"I like a look of Agony" by Emily Dickinson

I like a look of Agony,

Because I know it’s true -

Men do not sham Convulsion,

Nor simulate, a Throe -

The eyes glaze once - and that is Death -

Impossible to feign

The Beads opon the Forehead

By homely Anguish strung.

Source of the text - The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 152.

TJB: No faking. At her most hymnalistical, & sounding like Holden Caulfield, the poet dismounts with an image of “anguish” with a beading-needle.