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Donor Match Announced
Studio Sessions in Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom
Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Call for Proposals: April 9 – June 7, 2020
Remote Program: Poetry Discussion Group, May 22, 2020
Digital Dickinson
The Emily Dickinson Museum welcomes inquiries from researchers and strives to support their work.
Research at the Museum can be useful not only to Dickinson scholars but also to researchers interested in nineteenth-century material culture, social and cultural trends, domestic life, architecture, and decorative arts.
The Museum does not own Dickinson manuscripts or family papers but works closely with the institutions that do. The two major repositories for Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts and family papers are Amherst College and Harvard University. Additional repositories exist at the Jones Library in Amherst, MA, Mt. Holyoke College, Yale, and the Boston Public Library.
To learn more about digital and electronic Dickinson research resources, visit these institutional archives:
![Did you know that the first words of Emily's that we have recorded are from when she was just over two years old? Caught in a spring storm with her aunt, she dubbed the lightning "the fire" - which puts us in mind of the following poem, appropriate for day 3 of thunderstorms here in Amherst
The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low -
He threw a Menace at the Earth -
Another, at the Sky -
The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad -
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road -
The Wagons quickened on the streets
The Thunder hurried slow -
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak
And then a livid Claw -
The Birds put up the Bars to Nests -
The Cattle clung to Barns -
Then came one Drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands
That held the Dams, had parted hold,
The Waters wrecked the Sky,
But overlooked My Father's House -
just quartering a Tree -
[fr796]
During a rainstorm at the museum, many tours wrap up in this room on the ground floor of the Evergreens, which is otherwise not on the tour. It holds several notable items, including Emily's crib (here pictured), which, at the time she uttered "the fire", she might not have been long graduated from.](https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)