her poems "my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me," and occasionally she sounds as personal as a diary, but more often she pares her lines until they are as ambiguous and richly compacted as a Zen koan. Take this blasphemous little poem, as [Helen] Vendler calls it: "In name of the Bee--/And of the Butterfly--/And of the Breeze--Amen!" While this invocation naturalizes the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it doesn't wholly abandon it. Dickinson is careful that her nouns are "symbolic as well as 'real'; the Bee (for Being), the Butterfly (Psyche, the resurrected Soul) and the Breeze (the Spirit) all fit that criterion."from The Washington Post: Helen Vendler's new commentary on Emily Dickinson, reviewed by Michael Dirda
then On Point: Decoding Emily Dickinson
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