Variations on Emily

The song is a tribute to Emily Dickenson, taking some of her public domain poetry and adding original lyrics. The singer concludes Emily changed his life by teaching him to see things in a much different way.

Artist’s note:
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), New England poet, is one of the country’s greatest poets. Spending nearly all of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, the last half in relative seclusion, Emily came to be known as eccentric. Besides rare contacts with people outside her immediate family, she wore only white dresses and sometimes referred to herself as a wayward nun. Regarding her poems – only eleven of 1,775 poems were published during her lifetime – she advocated the “propounded word.” Her word for herself as a poet was “gnome,” and the poems themselves she called, “bulletins from Immortality.” Her last communication was written the day before her death, a short letter sent to relatives: “Little cousins, -- Called back. Emily.”