Review of “The Bat Is Dun, With Wrinkled Wings” (1876)
Emily Dickinson (writer).
Read in 2021.
It’s not particularly well done as a poem, but it sure is fun to see a poem in sincere praise of bats, not mere Gothic horror painting them as monsters. I don’t know whether Dickinson’s occasional transcendentalism had much to do with Emerson, but this poem feels a bit like the latter half of Emerson’s friend’s Walden (1854). It stands as a portal to later ecologically conscious literature.