My thanks once more to Mike (WalkerMan) for his kind support with my errant punctuation and that cool word, 'pelf'!
Pelf - booty, stolen money - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pelf

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886), born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was initially vivacious and outgoing but progressively withdrew into a recluse. Her vast body of work with all its complexities and themes is still the subject of much analysis and debate.

Stanza 1 - "There's a certain Slant of light" (1861). Her verse refers to the passing of time, the fading of the natural world juxtaposed with the permanence of the spiritual. But here I use it as a way of urging the reader to decide the meaning of her words. For her, poetry was a way of telling the truth at a slant (colourfully and opaquely).
See verse: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1868)
Only seven out of her total of 1775 poems were published prior to her death, many of which didn't even have titles, making some analysis even more complicated.

Stanza 2 - from "They shut me up in prose"

"Still! Could themselves have peeped -
And seen my Brain go round -
They might as well have lodged a Bird
For Treason - in the Pound -"

Stanza 3 & 4 - from "The Secret"

"Some things that fly there be, -
Birds, hours, the bumble bee:
Of these no elegy.

Some things that stay there be, -
Grief, hills, eternity:
Nor this behooveth me.

There are, that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the riddle lies?"

Stanza 5 & 6 - see the following verses:

"The brain is wider than the sea."
"Hope is the thing with feathers -"

"Hope" is one of her many allusions to birds and the wonder they represent.
She characteristically dressed in white, a petite, rather bird-like figure.

Stanza 7 -
"The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door.
To her divine majority
Present no more."

Stanza 8 - from the verse "I felt a funeral in my brain"

But one of my favourites:

"If I shouldn't be alive
When the robins come
Give the one in red cravat
A memorial crumb.

If I couldn't thank you,
Being just asleep.
You will know I'm trying
With my granite lip!"

Stanza 9 - from "Wild Nights - Wild Nights!" (1862)

Since most of the editing of her works took place after her death, there is continued speculation about the subject of the verse. There is no doubt she felt passion, albeit possibly in the imagination, for a married preacher. However, it is known that she had a very intimate relationship with Susan, her sister-in-law, once again another relationship that would have been condemned at the time. But this poem is irrefutably sexy from someone as "buttoned-up" as Emily could be!

"Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In Thee!"

Stanza 10 - from: "Much madness is divinest sense."

"Assent and you are sane;
Demur, you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain."

She was never afraid to speak out against the norms of the day:
considering her home - the church; her books and imagination - the clergy. Neither did she shy away from the search for universal truth through personal experience:

"Adventure most unto itself
The soul condemned to be,
Attended by a single hound,
Its own identity."

Stanza 11 & 12 - Never seeking to be a "somebody," she kept most of her work private, almost self-consciously daunted by public reaction to whether her poetry "breathed."

"How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell your name the lifelong day
To an admiring bog!"

And "This is my letter to the world."

"This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me, -
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!"

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