Susan was science personified, capitalized—she would haunt Dickinson’s poems for decades to come as “Science.” Throughout their lifelong relationship, Dickinson would punctuate her stormy devotion with sunny wit. In one of her “letter-poems,” as Susan called the missives that read like poems and the poems that conveyed concrete messages, she writes: Dear Susie—I send you a little air— The “Music of the Spheres” The concept of the “Music of the Spheres” is attributed to Pythagoras, but Dickinson is likely teasing Susan—a mathematician—with a joke about the “Pythagorean maxim” Herman Melville
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