B.ack in November, long before our world was overturned, I sent an email to Dan Chiasson, Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English at Wellesley. The subject line read: “I’m Nobody.”

我写信询问我是否可以审计英格357：春天的艾米莉狄金森的世界。我承认它感到有点大胆地指的是狄金森最着名的诗歌之一。

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
然后有一双我们 - 不要告诉！
他们知道，他们会引起我们。

How dreary to be somebody!
公众，像青蛙一样
告诉你的名字Livelong Day
欣赏博格！

B.ut Chiasson replied, “Catherine, with that subject line, how can I say no??”

“I’m Nobody!” is the first poem I remember knowing. Perhaps it actually was the first; perhaps I learned it later, and it effaced other, simpler rhymes. It hardly matters. Because what I remember, what I still embrace as “first poem,” is this Emily Dickinson verse, written in Amherst, Mass., circa 1861, and listed as #288 in the Thomas H. Johnson edition of her poems, published initially in 1960.

所以在1月份，我买了一份新鲜的约翰逊的770页副本Emily Dickinson的完整诗歌and slipped diffidently into my first college-level English class since the 1970s. Room 338, on the third floor of Green Hall, was chilly that day. Every seat was filled, and we sat elbow-to-elbow and notebook-to-notebook as class began.

Reading my notes from those first weeks, I see that our class explored Dickinson family biography, read excerpts from essays about 19th-century material culture and attitudes to death, about the intellectual life of Amherst, Mass., and about the role of the Civil War in Dickinson’s work. We went online to interpret her handwriting and her use of punctuation—those dashes!—amid the riches of the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open-source website of the poet’s handwritten manuscripts. We speculated about the unsolved mystery of her withdrawal from the world into her bedroom on the second floor of the Dickinson homestead. We began to call her Emily, addressing her as one might a friend rather than with the traditional English-major trope of “the speaker,” or “the narrator.”

在每一堂课中，我们作为一个团体审计员曾努力 - 大声朗读诗歌，解剖他们的大声和破折号，他们的暴力时刻，他们的口头拼图，他们对自然敬畏。我们一起发现了Chiasson呼叫的是什么称之为“文学中最令人兴奋和最特殊的思想之一”。

这对我来说是令人兴奋的东西;我可以在我的脑海中感到长闭门，想象力吱吱作响。我喜欢围绕学生的能源和承诺，他们愿意冒着对艾米莉工作和生活的解释。我喜欢Chiasson的古怪武理，他的参考文献从形而上学诗人都能流行文化和电视，有时在一个句子中。

星期二在3月初有一个足够温暖allow us to hold class outside, declaiming Dickinson in the amphitheater behind Alumnae Hall. We were looking forward to an April field trip to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst; to a 5 a.m. silent meeting in May on the shores of Lake Waban to listen to the birds’ dawn chorus; to a final gathering at our professor’s house to watch episodes of the cult favorite streaming TV showDickinson。

B.ut everything changed. In mid-March, we left Wellesley’s campus, and as Emily wrote in #303, “then shut the door.”

Two weeks later, we reconvened. Chiasson fired up Zoom and set up a retro blog for posting poems and commenting on them. Everyone started a journal. ENG 357 was back, stripped down and reconstituted digitally. And we went straight back to the poems. From around the country, seated in bedrooms and on back porches, in kitchens and home libraries and one auditor’s piano studio, we re-entered the world of Emily Dickinson. There was palpable joy in being together again, even digitally.

“I’m sure it has occurred to you that our interiors—our bounded environments, however large or small, and wherever we find ourselves—are suddenly our entire worlds; our predicament or opportunity mirrors Dickinson’s,” Chiasson wrote to the class.

It felt to many of us that Dickinson was teaching us how to live richly within the boundaries of our new world. Reviewing my notes from our very first class, I read that after Emily’s retreat to her room, her letters and poems became her social life. Read “Zoom” for “letters” and that was true for the 22 of us in ENG 357, too.

“我忍不住觉得狄金森的语言现在是现在的内脏提醒，”Paige Calvert '20在课堂博客中写道。“今天感觉就像我把”我/玻璃一样新的开花“一样，”拿出我的床上坐在我的床上两周，找到了一些新的东西，希望更新，恢复活力。别人觉得相似吗？这回到Wellesley虽然是数字，但为我带来了一种新的平静感，即我在很长一段时间里。诚实地让我今天早上撕裂的行是：'我们不能把自己放在外面。“因为某种方式这正是我觉得我的感受。我觉得我在过渡时期的一段时间，我才刚刚醒来，决定回来，出来，再来'肉体'。它真的非常出色，埃米莉的话可以继续拥有这样的影响 - 现在，当我们在家时，转向艺术，音乐，文学，诗歌，剧院让我们感受到人类的诗歌是最好的。“

Sara Lucas ’22 wrote, “This time trapped in a smaller world has been teaching me the wonders of knowing one space very intimately. I’m so used to being out and about that I’ve never noticed the small worlds existing right in my childhood bedroom or my parents’ backyard. I think of Emily as I watch a hummingbird drink from our rain-filled eaves, as I track an ant’s path over the brick steps to our front door, or as I contemplate the green leaves of the old oak tree outside my bedroom window. I think of the acuity and wonder with which she took in her limited surroundings, and I strive to do the same.”

When I signed up for ENG 357, I thought I would learn more about the work of a poet I had loved since childhood. Little did I know that I was signing up for a wise, maddening, observant, and challenging guide to our post-pandemic solitude. Take, for instance, this undated poem, #1695:

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
社会是
与波纹网站相比
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite Infinity.

In 2016, Chiasson wrote in aNew Yorkerbook review, “This is an extraordinary time to read Dickinson, one of the richest moments since her death. The publication of信封诗以及在线和廉价的印刷版提供的Dickinson的手稿的越来越多的狄金森稿件，恰逢阿默斯特狄金森特性的雄心勃勃的恢复。...“

在2020年春天读取狄金森的读书是多少，我们都不可能预见。然而，在阿默斯特在她的卧室里发现她的声音的轻微，逃避，白包诗人变成了一个完美的伴侣。我们每个人都在我们的房间里，但是我们在一起。