Jones Very

Season 3 Episode 6 of Dickinson they visit a mental institution, and that got me thinking about Jones Very. 

Jones Very (1813-1880) was a poet from Salem who went to Harvard, but was dismissed because he saw himself as the second coming of Christ. His mother, Lydia Very, was known for being an aggressive freethinker who made her atheistic beliefs known to all. She believed that marriage was only a moral arrangement and not a legal one. His father, also named Jones Very, was a captain during the War of 1812 and was held in Nova Scotia for a time by the British as a prisoner of war. When the younger Jones Very was 10, his father, by then a shipmaster, took him on a sailing voyage to Russia. A year later, his father had Very serve as a cabin boy on a trip to New Orleans, Louisiana. His father died on the return trip, apparently due to a lung disease he contracted while in Nova Scotia.

Poems:

Nature

The bubbling brook doth leap when I come by,

Because my feet find measure with its call;

The birds know when the friend they love is nigh,

For I am known to them, both great and small.

The flower that on the lonely hillside grows

Expects me there when spring its bloom has given;

And many a tree and bush my wanderings knows,

And e'en the clouds and silent stars of heaven;

For he who with his Maker walks aright,

Shall be their lord as Adam was before;

Thy Better Self

I AM thy other self, what thou wilt be,

When thou art I, the one seest now;

In finding thy true self thou wilt find me,

The springing blade, where now thou dost but plough.

I am thy neighbor, a new house I've built,

Which thou as yet hast never entered in;

I come to call thee; come in when thou wilt,

The feast is always ready to begin.

Thou should'st love me, as thou dost love thyself,

For I am but another self beside;

To show thee him thou lov'st in better health,

What thou would'st be, when thou to him hast died;

Then visit me, I make thee many a call;

Nor live I near to thee alone, but all.

His ear shall catch each sound with new delight,

Each object wear the dress that then it wore;

And he, as when erect in soul he stood,

Hear from his Father's lips that all is good

Soul-Sickness

How many of the body's health complain,

When they some deeper malady conceal;

Some unrest of the soul, some secret pain,

Which thus its presence doth to them reveal.

Vain would we seek, by the physician's aid,

A name for this soul-sickness e'er to find;

A remedy for health and strength decayed,

Whose cause and cure are wholly of the mind

To higher nature is the soul allied,

And restless seeks its being's Source to know;

Finding not health nor strength in aught beside;

How often vainly sought in things below,

Whether in sunny clime, or sacred stream,

Or plant of wondrous powers of which we dream!