"The Poets light but Lamps --"

The Poets light but Lamps --
Themselves -- go out --
The Wicks they stimulate --
If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns --
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference --

F (930), 1865

This poem finds Dickinson reflexively examining the work of the poet and how it is shaped by the passage of time and vice versa. The first line presents what is potentially an example of one of many noticeable formal quirks of Dickinson's poetics, as she often played by her own rules when it came to punctuation. The lack of an apostrophe (one of the more common forms of punctuation she typically jettisoned) in her use of "Poets" here functions to allow the line to be read two ways, one where an apostrophe is assumed (The Poet's light but Lamps) and the other where it is simply referring to the plural of "Poet" where "light" becomes a verb. Either feels plausibly correct for a Dickinson poem, but it is interesting to note that both options circle around to the same meaning: though the poet(s) "Themselves -- go out --" and physically die, their work may live on, with every new era through which they continue to be preserved providing new ways to read and interpret what they've left behind. 

Lamps in a row like poets through the ages.

It is hard to read a poem that speaks of poetry on such a large, universal scale and not wonder how Dickinson saw herself fitting into it, particularly given her staunch views against publication and wishes to have her works burned after her death. One's attention is drawn to the qualifier that ends the first stanza and extends into the next: "The Wicks they stimulate -- /if vital light/Inhere as do the Suns --" Could this possibly be Dickinson making a kind of value judgement on her own work, questioning its potential for longevity? Whatever the case may be in that regard, one would be hard pressed to argue that Dickinson's work doesn't almost perfectly exemplify the very nearly mythical passage into timeless sublimity that the second stanza seems to describe, as it has managed to touch generations of readers throughout the world, with each one offering up new schools of theory and criticism in the process of fathoming the true scope of Dickinson's "Circumference."