Myself was formed a Carpenter by Emily Dickinson

Сама я стала плотник,
и скромно, что ни год,
со стругом мы трудились
до Зодчего шагов

к оценке достижений:
коль в ремесле вязать
доску с доской горазды,
мог на паях бы взять...

Мне брать резцами - лица,
и нам верстак к делам,
тому, кто с наймом вился -
- Нам - храмы, - изрекла...



(Эмили - с газетчиком-издателем.)
[David Preest:
Emily, who was no Carpenter, is presumably using
the word as a metaphor for poet, but it is not obvious
who the ‘Builder’ of the poem is. What follows is a guess.
She began writing poems without thought of publication
in ‘an unpretending time,’ but one day a newspaperman
arrived to say that if her art was ‘sufficiently developed,’
he would hire her, with profits shared, to write poems
for his newspaper. But when she considered the real
‘human faces’ in the poems produced in her workshop and
the long labour that had gone into their making, she
replied to the newspaperman that what she wrote were
temples of true poems that would last and not
ephemera for newspapers.]

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Myself was formed -- a Carpenter by Emily Dickinson

Myself was formed -- a Carpenter --         
An unpretending time               
My Plane -- and I, together wrought         
Before a Builder came --               

To measure our attainments --               
Had we the Art of Boards               
Sufficiently developed --               
He'd hire us At Halves --               

My Tools took Human -- Faces --             
The Bench, where we had toiled --            
Against the Man -- persuaded --             
We -- Temples build -- I said --