What mystery pervades a well!

Not having posted a poem in a long while and it being National Poetry Day, here's an exquisite one from Emily Dickinson, which I discovered through Carol Rumens' wonderful exploration of it on the Guardian books blog earlier this week:

What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far —
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar

Whose limit none has ever seen,
But just his lid of glass —
Like looking every time you please In an abyss's face!

The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands near the sea —
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet:
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.