NOTES

This poem was written in 1859.

St. Domingo: from the early days of colonialism in the Americas through the 19th century, St. Domingo referred to the entire island bordered to the south by the Carribean Sea and to the north by the North Atlantic Ocean, although it now refers to the capitol city of the Dominican Republic. Until 1859 when the present governements of Haiti and the Dominican Republic were established, the native population vied with French, British, and Spanish colonial forces for control of the island; it was the site of a violent 19th century slave rebellion. For more information on St. Domingo's culture and the slave rebellion, follow this link to The Santo Domingo Moment .

In the first stanza, Dickinson muses on the difficulty of explaining how beauty, such as in a flower, touches people on levels from ecstasy to humility; and then in the second, she articulates the complexity of beauty--a quality which includes "pathos" as well as "aesethic" value--in her description of the "butterflies from St. Domingo." The allusion to the exotic locale of St. Domingo provides a superlative for transcendent beauty.

In Johnson, Complete Poems, it is #137.