A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
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It struck me every day
The lightning was as new
As if the cloud that instant slit
And let the fire through.
It burned me in the night,
It blistered in my dream;
It sickened fresh upon my sight
With every morning’s beam.
I thought that storm was brief, –
The maddest, quickest by;
But Nature lost the date of this,
And left it in the sky.
If tolling bell I ask the cause.
‘A soul has gone to God,’
I’m answered in a lonesome tone;
Is heaven then so sad?
That bells should joyful ring to tell
A soul had gone to heaven,
Would seem to me the proper way
A good news should be given.
The soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.
Depart, before the host has slid
The bolt upon the door,
To seek for the accomplished guest, –
Her visitor no more.
I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool, –
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
I’ve got an arrow here;
Loving the hand that sent it,
I the dart revere.
Fell, they will say, in ‘skirmish’!
Vanquished, my soul will know,
By but a simple arrow
Sped by an archer’s bow.
Tags: soul
There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables,–
At once is mute again.
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted brother
Gave his breath away.
Wherever runs the breathless sun,
Wherever roams the day,
There is its noiseless onset,
There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul ‘forgot’!
One blessing had I, than the rest
So larger to my eyes
That I stopped gauging, satisfied,
For this enchanted size.
It was the limit of my dream,
The focus of my prayer, –
A perfect, paralyzing bliss
Contented as despair.
I knew no more of want or cold,
Phantasms both become,
For this new value in the soul,
Supremest earthly sum.
The heaven below the heaven above
Obscured with ruddier hue.
Life’s latitude leant over-full;
The judgment perished, too.
Why joys so scantily disburse,
Why Paradise defer,
Why floods are served to us in bowls, –
I speculate no more.
