In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem about Richard Cory, who is the envy of everyone in his New England town and in the last line of the short poem blows his brains out, we come to understand that people are not their public presentation, that their relationship to their own existence is something we may or may not be getting a glimpse of. And we may begin to be more observant and to imagine our way into their lives. [...]

There are poems of not-knowing that are, for me, very connected to this and have the same quality. One of my favorite haiku is by Basho, who is a poet I think of as actually having many connections to Emily Dickinson. It’s a poem that takes the classic, almost cliché subject of the haiku, the middle high part of the autumn season—the phrase in Japanese is aki fukaki, usually translated “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens,” and there are many such poems: “deep autumn the leaves are falling . . .” “deep autumn even now the quinces . . . ,” deep autumn this and that; the poem of Basho’s on this subject goes:

Deep autumn—
  my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?

Paraphrasing haiku, I know, is like explaining jokes; it’s a sort of hopeless enterprise. But what is deeply moving to me about this poem is the way it gets whatever it is in our bodies that groans with gorgeous and painful knowledge in the turning of the year. And it gets the feeling of separateness from other people that accompanies it. And the longing to be connected back to them. Or an awakened curiosity about them, as if, waking to the fact that there are other people with other lives, the speaker in the poem has a sudden taste of his own self, of his having one and being one. Both these poems borrow on long religious traditions. One might not think so, but to speak of “deep autumn” in the Buddhist tradition is to speak of a fundamental idea about nature, that it is impermanent and contingent, as much as talking about light recalls the Gospel of John for a Christian—both of them are poems of essential loneliness that have in them a long experience of religion and a longing for it and a deep separateness from it. And what they have pledged themselves to, as a representation of spirituality, is the work of imagination.

Numinous in this case really being some inarticulate feeling that rose up in her with that quality of light, which of course is the old image of the relationship to the divine