A little madness in the spring

Smart Guy sent me this picture, which he found on Reddit. It made me laugh, so I hope it will make you laugh too. I've actually seen that scenario happen, just today in fact, while waiting for the bus.

The title of this post is from a poem by my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. Emily was a very interesting person, who got a little eccentric as she got older. She never left her father's house in Amherst, and her older sister Lavinia discovered her poems in a box after Emily died in her early fifties. From the Wikipedia link:

Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

But her poems, nevertheless, have always impacted me very deeply. Sometimes I have wondered if there is something about them that makes me particularly susceptible. I do know that only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime, and they changed the wording, punctuation and capitalization to make them more like standard nineteenth-century poetry, and I can't imagine how that made her feel. They really ruined them to make them conform to somebody's idea of what they should be like. She didn't become a noted poet until long after her death. She used dashes and very unconventional capitalization, as seen in this image from the above Wikipedia link. Today, Emily Dickinson's poetry has many scholars who have devoted their entire lives to their study, so I don't feel at all out of place because of my love of her poems. Her body of work is taught in American literature and poetry classes here and around the world. Someone who was unknown during her lifetime has now become as well known today as any poet, living or dead.

When I used to go on solo overnight hikes into the wilderness, I would take along a set of her poems to memorize to keep me company. Some are well known, but I think the ones I know by heart are not that popular. I just memorized the ones that kept coming to me in snippets. This is one of my favorites, with her dashes and capitalization intact:

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!

Emily Dickinson, c. 1875

:-)