The Dickinson Sublime
mapping eternity
1735
After her death in 1865, 1735 poems were discovered in Emily Dickinson’s room, hidden and neatly organized into hand-sewn fascicles. A body of work left by a genius who stared into the face of eternity and took a step.
Sublime Threads
Dickinson’s work weaves an intricate web of themes, where life, death, and the infinite collide. These connections form an uncharted cosmos that beckons us to explore the mysteries she left behind.
How It Works
Position
Using an LLM-generated sentence embedding, each poem’s vectors are averaged and positioned in 3D space so that poems with similar themes naturally cluster together.
Color
A poem’s color is chosen by normalizing its x-coordinate within the embedding space to a predefined palette, so semantically similar poems share similar hues, with slight deterministic variation for clarity.
Connections
Connections link poems based on weighted shared themes and motifs, combined with the two nearest neighbors in embedding space, highlighting both thematic and semantic relationships.
Size
The size of each node reflects its total number of connections—poems with more related neighbors appear larger to emphasize their centrality in the network.
The Mind of Emily Dickinson
Explore the Poems
| ID | Poem | Date | Stanzas | Lines | Emphases |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, | 1850 | 2 | 40 | 28 |
| 2 | There is another sky, | 1851 | 1 | 14 | 2 |
| 3 | "Sic transit gloria mundi," | 1852 | 16 | 64 | 14 |
| 4 | On this wondrous sea | 1853 | 3 | 12 | 1 |
| 5 | I have a Bird in spring | 1854 | 5 | 30 | 0 |
| 6 | Frequently the woods are pink - | 1858 | 3 | 12 | 1 |
| 7 | The feet of people walking home | 1858 | 3 | 24 | 0 |
| 8 | There is a word | 1858 | 2 | 18 | 0 |
| 9 | Through lane it lay - through bramble - | 1858 | 4 | 17 | 2 |
| 10 | My wheel is in the dark! | 1858 | 4 | 15 | 0 |