I’m delighted to see that Harper’s has Charles Bernstein’s “Water Images of The New Yorker ” online. It’s a funny take on what Bernstein terms “official verse culture.”
Writing from memory, I had “The stone’s in the midst of it all.” That’s how I’ve had the line in my head since I was an undergrad. But no. Yeats’s poem reads, “The stone’s in the midst of all.”
Dickinson’s poem sits in a folder in my head with Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and “Neutral Tones” and Ted Berrigan’s “A Certain Slant of Sunlight.”