Emily Dickinson

A feather from the whippoorwill

A feather from the whippoorwill
That everlasting sings,

galleries are sunrise

Dickinson switches the usual metaphor—instead of the bird singing *about* nature, nature becomes the architecture of its song. Galleries = exhibition spaces.

Whose galleries are sunrise,
Whose stanzas are the spring,
Whose emerald nest the ages spin

emerald nest the ages spin

The nest isn't built by the bird but by time itself. 'Spin' makes geological time sound like a spider's work—slow, continuous, delicate.

With mellow murmuring thread,

beryl egg

Beryl is a pale blue-green gemstone. She's making the egg both precious and unattainably high—'overhead' means heaven, not just trees.

Whose beryl egg what schoolboys hunt
In "recess" overhead!

"recess" overhead

The quotation marks matter. Recess = break from school, but also a recessed space. Heaven is the ultimate playground, forever out of reach.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Poem That Repeats Itself

This poem is the same eight lines printed twice. Not a printer's error—Dickinson did this deliberately in several poems. The effect is strange: it reads like a stuck record, or a song refrain without verses, or obsessive repetition.

The whippoorwill's song is famously repetitive—the bird calls its own name hundreds of times without stopping. By repeating the entire poem, Dickinson mimics the bird's insistent, circular music. The form *is* the content.

But there's a second effect: the repetition makes you read differently the second time. First pass, you're figuring out the metaphors. Second pass, you notice how weird they are—a bird whose nest is spun by *ages*, whose egg is a *gemstone*, whose song galleries are *sunrise*. The strangeness compounds.

Dickinson's Gemstone Vocabulary

Emerald and beryl aren't just pretty words—they're Dickinson's code for the unattainable. She uses gemstone imagery throughout her work to mark things that are precious, hard, and impossible to possess. The whippoorwill's nest and egg aren't real nest and egg; they're crystallized,永久的, out of human time.

Beryl specifically is a pale stone, the mineral family that includes emerald and aquamarine. It suggests something translucent, fragile, celestial. The 'schoolboys hunt' for it during recess, but the quotation marks around 'recess' signal the word is doing double duty: both playground break and the recessed space of heaven. They're hunting for something in the sky that they'll never catch.

The whippoorwill in American folklore is a death omen—its call means someone will die soon. Dickinson transforms this into a bird of *everlasting* song, spinning the death-bird into an emblem of eternity. The whole poem is about things that seem earthly (feathers, nests, eggs) but are actually cosmic and untouchable.