18 pages 36 minutes read

Emily Dickinson

What mystery pervades a well!

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896

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Related Poems

A Dew Sufficed Itself” by Emily Dickinson

In this poem, the speaker finds infinity and unknowable mystery in another small and bounded body of water—this time, a drop of dew.

As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden (1940)

Auden explores the balance of manmade and natural beauty, with a similar form and rhyme scheme to “What mystery pervades a well.”

Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney (1966)

Filled with nostalgia for a child’s love of wells and well water, Heaney’s poem provides an interesting contrast to Dickinson’s. Unlike Dickinson’s speaker, whose sense of wonder at nature never fades, Heaney’s speaker rues the ebbing away of curiosity that accompanies age and maturity.

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By Emily Dickinson

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