A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
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Three weeks passed since I had seen her, –
Some disease had vexed;
‘T was with text and village singing
I beheld her next,
And a company — our pleasure
To discourse alone;
Gracious now to me as any,
Gracious unto none.
Borne, without dissent of either,
To the parish night;
Of the separated people
Which are out of sight?
I sing to use the waiting,
My bonnet but to tie,
And shut the door unto my house;
No more to do have I,
Till, his best step approaching,
We journey to the day,
And tell each other how we sang
To keep the dark away.
I meant to find her when I came;
Death had the same design;
But the success was his, it seems,
And the discomfit mine.
I meant to tell her how I longed
For just this single time;
But Death had told her so the first,
And she had hearkened him.
To wander now is my abode;
To rest, — to rest would be
A privilege of hurricane
To memory and me.
How dare the robins sing,
When men and women hear
Who since they went to their account
Have settled with the year! –
Paid all that life had earned
In one consummate bill,
And now, what life or death can do
Is immaterial.
Insulting is the sun
To him whose mortal light,
Beguiled of immortality,
Bequeaths him to the night.
In deference to him
Extinct be every hum,
Whose garden wrestles with the dew,
At daybreak overcome!
A dew sufficed itself
And satisfied a leaf,
And felt, ‘how vast a destiny!
How trivial is life!’
The sun went out to work,
The day went out to play,
But not again that dew was seen
By physiognomy.
Whether by day abducted,
Or emptied by the sun
Into the sea, in passing,
Eternally unknown.
The spider as an artist
Has never been employed
Though his surpassing merit
Is freely certified
By every broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian land.
Neglected son of genius,
I take thee by the hand.
I live with him, I see his face;
I go no more away
For visitor, or sundown;
Death’s single privacy,
The only one forestalling mine,
And that by right that he
Presents a claim invisible,
No wedlock granted me.
I live with him, I hear his voice,
I stand alive to-day
To witness to the certainty
Of immortality
Taught me by Time, — the lower way,
Conviction every day, –
That life like this is endless,
Be judgment what it may.
Tags: alive, away, death, ice, Life, may, men, see, sing, sun
Not with a club the heart is broken,
Nor with a stone;
A whip, so small you could not see it.
I’ve known
To lash the magic creature
Till it fell,
Yet that whip’s name too noble
Then to tell.
Magnanimous of bird
By boy descried,
To sing unto the stone
Of which it died.
