Poems by Emily Dickinson
Book IV.
Time and Eternity.
- This world is not conclusion;
- A sequel stands beyond,
- Invisible, as music,
- But positive, as sound.
- It beckons and it baffles;
- Philosophies don't know,
- And through a riddle, at the last,
- Sagacity must go.
- To guess it puzzles scholars;
- To gain it, men have shown
- Contempt of generations,
- And crucifixion known.
- We learn in the retreating
- How vast an one
- Was recently among us.
- A perished sun
- Endears in the departure
- How doubly more
- Than all the golden presence
- It was before!
- They say that 'time assuages,'--
- Time never did assuage;
- An actual suffering strengthens,
- As sinews do, with age.
- Time is a test of trouble,
- But not a remedy.
- If such it prove, it prove too
- There was no malady.
- We cover thee, sweet face.
- Not that we tire of thee,
- But that thyself fatigue of us;
- Remember, as thou flee,
- We follow thee until
- Thou notice us no more,
- And then, reluctant, turn away
- To con thee o'er and o'er,
- And blame the scanty love
- We were content to show,
- Augmented, sweet, a hundred fold
- If thou would'st take it now.
- That is solemn we have ended,--
- Be it but a play,
- Or a glee among the garrets,
- Or a holiday,
- Or a leaving home; or later,
- Parting with a world
- We have understood, for better
- Still it be unfurled.
- The stimulus, beyond the grave
- His countenance to see,
- Supports me like imperial drams
- Afforded royally.
- Given in marriage unto thee,
- Oh, thou celestial host!
- Bride of the Father and the Son,
- Bride of the Holy Ghost!
- Other betrothal shall dissolve,
- Wedlock of will decay;
- Only the keeper of this seal
- Conquers mortality.
- That such have died enables us
- The tranquiller to die;
- That such have lived, certificate
- For immortality.
- They won't frown always,--some sweet day
- When I forget to tease,
- They 'll recollect how cold I looked,
- And how I just said 'please.'
- Then they will hasten to the door
- To call the little child,
- Who cannot thank them, for the ice
- That on her lisping piled.
- It is an honorable thought,
- And makes one lift one's hat,
- As one encountered gentlefolk
- Upon a daily street,
- That we 've immortal place,
- Though pyramids decay,
- And kingdoms, like the orchard,
- Flit russetly away.
- The distance that the dead have gone
- Does not at first appear;
- Their coming back seems possible
- For many an ardent year.
- And then, that we have followed them
- We more than half suspect,
- So intimate have we become
- With their dear retrospect.
- 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!
- Death is like the insect
- Menacing the tree,
- Competent to kill it,
- But decoyed may be.
- Bait it with the balsam,
- Seek it with the knife,
- Baffle, if it cost you
- Everything in life.
- Then, if it have burrowed
- Out of reach of skill,
- Ring the tree and leave it,--
- 'T is the vermin's will.
- 'T is sunrise, little maid, hast thou
- No station in the day?
- 'T was not thy wont to hinder so,--
- Retrieve thine industry.
- 'T is noon, my little maid, alas!
- And art thou sleeping yet?
- The lily waiting to be wed,
- The bee, dost thou forget?
- My little maid, 't is night; alas,
- That night should be to thee
- Instead of morning! Hadst thou broached
- Thy little plan to me,
- Dissuade thee if I could not, sweet,
- I might have aided thee.
- Each that we lose takes part of us;
- A crescent still abides,
- Which like the moon, some turbid night,
- Is summoned by the tides.
- Not any higher stands the grave
- For heroes than for men;
- Not any nearer for the child
- Than numb three-score and ten.
- This latest leisure equal lulls
- The beggar and his queen;
- Propitiate this democrat
- By summer's gracious mien.
- As far from pity as complaint,
- As cool to speech as stone,
- As numb to revelation
- As if my trade were bone.
- As far from time as history,
- As near yourself to-day
- As children to the rainbow's scarf,
- Or sunset's yellow play
- To eyelids in the sepulchre.
- How still the dancer lies,
- While color's revelations break,
- And blaze the butterflies!
- 'T is whiter than an Indian pipe,
- 'T is dimmer than a lace;
- No stature has it, like a fog,
- When you approach the place.
- Not any voice denotes it here,
- Or intimates it there;
- A spirit, how doth it accost?
- What customs hath the air?
- This limitless hyperbole
- Each one of us shall be;
- 'T is drama, if (hypothesis)
- It be not tragedy!
- She laid her docile crescent down,
- And this mechanic stone
- Still states, to dates that have forgot,
- The news that she is gone.
- So constant to its stolid trust,
- The shaft that never knew,
- It shames the constancy that fled
- Before its emblem flew.
- Bless God, he went as soldiers,
- His musket on his breast;
- Grant, God, he charge the bravest
- Of all the martial blest.
- Please God, might I behold him
- In epauletted white,
- I should not fear the foe then,
- I should not fear the fight.
- Immortal is an ample word
- When what we need is by,
- But when it leaves us for a time,
- 'T is a necessity.
- Of heaven above the firmest proof
- We fundamental know,
- Except for its marauding hand,
- It had been heaven below.
- Where every bird is bold to go,
- And bees abashless play,
- The foreigner before he knocks
- Must thrust the tears away.
- The grave my little cottage is,
- Where, keeping house for thee,
- I make my parlor orderly,
- And lay the marble tea,
- For two divided, briefly,
- A cycle, it may be,
- Till everlasting life unite
- In strong society.
- This was in the white of the year,
- That was in the green,
- Drifts were as difficult then to think
- As daisies now to be seen.
- Looking back is best that is left,
- Or if it be before,
- Retrospection is prospect's half,
- Sometimes almost more.
- Sweet hours have perished here;
- This is a mighty room;
- Within its precincts hopes have played,--
- Now shadows in the tomb.
- Me! Come! My dazzled face
- In such a shining place!
- Me! Hear! My foreign ear
- The sounds of welcome near!
- The saints shall meet
- Our bashful feet.
- My holiday shall be
- That they remember me;
- My paradise, the fame
- That they pronounce my name.
- From us she wandered now a year,
- Her tarrying unknown;
- If wilderness prevent her feet,
- Or that ethereal zone
- No eye hath seen and lived,
- We ignorant must be.
- We only know what time of year
- We took the mystery.
- I wish I knew that woman's name,
- So, when she comes this way,
- To hold my life, and hold my ears,
- For fear I hear her say
- She 's 'sorry I am dead,' again,
- Just when the grave and I
- Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep,--
- Our only lullaby.
- Bereaved of all, I went abroad,
- No less bereaved to be
- Upon a new peninsula,--
- The grave preceded me,
- Obtained my lodgings ere myself,
- And when I sought my bed,
- The grave it was, reposed upon
- The pillow for my head.
- I waked, to find it first awake,
- I rose,--it followed me;
- I tried to drop it in the crowd,
- To lose it in the sea,
- In cups of artificial drowse
- To sleep its shape away,--
- The grave was finished, but the spade
- Remained in memory.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- A sickness of this world it most occasions
- When best men die;
- A wishfulness their fat condition
- To occupy.
- A chief indifference, as foreign
- A world must be
- Themselves forsake contented,
- For Deity.
- Superfluous were the sun
- When excellence is dead;
- He were superfluous every day,
- For every day is said
- That syllable whose faith
- Just saves it from despair,
- And whose 'I 'll meet you' hesitates
- If love inquire, 'Where?'
- Upon his dateless fame
- Our periods may lie,
- As stars that drop anonymous
- From an abundant sky.
- So proud she was to die
- It made us all ashamed
- That what we cherished, so unknown
- To her desire seemed.
- So satisfied to go
- Where none of us should be,
- Immediately, that anguish stooped
- Almost to jealousy.
- Tie the strings to my life, my Lord,
- Then I am ready to go!
- Just a look at the horses--
- Rapid! That will do!
- Put me in on the firmest side,
- So I shall never fall;
- For we must ride to the Judgment,
- And it 's partly down hill.
- But never I mind the bridges,
- And never I mind the sea;
- Held fast in everlasting race
- By my own choice and thee.
- Good-by to the life I used to live,
- And the world I used to know;
- And kiss the hills for me, just once;
- Now I am ready to go!
- The dying need but little, dear,--
- A glass of water 's all,
- A flower's unobtrusive face
- To punctuate the wall,
- A fan, perhaps, a friend's regret,
- And certainly that one
- No color in the rainbow
- Perceives when you are gone.
- There 's something quieter than sleep
- Within this inner room!
- It wears a sprig upon its breast,
- And will not tell its name.
- Some touch it and some kiss it,
- Some chafe its idle hand;
- It has a simple gravity
- I do not understand!
- While simple-hearted neighbors
- Chat of the 'early dead,'
- We, prone to periphrasis,
- Remark that birds have fled!
- 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.
- 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 breathed enough to learn the trick,
- And now, removed from air,
- I simulate the breath so well,
- That one, to be quite sure
- The lungs are stirless, must descend
- Among the cunning cells,
- And touch the pantomime himself.
- How cool the bellows feels!
- I wonder if the sepulchre
- Is not a lonesome way,
- When men and boys, and larks and June
- Go down the fields to hay!
- 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.
- If I may have it when it 's dead
- I will contented be;
- If just as soon as breath is out
- It shall belong to me,
- Until they lock it in the grave,
- 'T is bliss I cannot weigh,
- For though they lock thee in the grave,
- Myself can hold the key.
- Think of it, lover! I and thee
- Permitted face to face to be;
- After a life, a death we 'll say,--
- For death was that, and this is thee.
- Before the ice is in the pools,
- Before the skaters go,
- Or any cheek at nightfall
- Is tarnished by the snow,
- Before the fields have finished,
- Before the Christmas tree,
- Wonder upon wonder
- Will arrive to me!
- What we touch the hems of
- On a summer's day;
- What is only walking
- Just a bridge away;
- That which sings so, speaks so,
- When there 's no one here,--
- Will the frock I wept in
- Answer me to wear?
- I heard a fly buzz when I died;
- The stillness round my form
- Was like the stillness in the air
- Between the heaves of storm.
- The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
- And breaths were gathering sure
- For that last onset, when the king
- Be witnessed in his power.
- I willed my keepsakes, signed away
- What portion of me I
- Could make assignable,--and then
- There interposed a fly,
- With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
- Between the light and me;
- And then the windows failed, and then
- I could not see to see.
- Adrift! A little boat adrift!
- And night is coming down!
- Will no one guide a little boat
- Unto the nearest town?
- So sailors say, on yesterday,
- Just as the dusk was brown,
- One little boat gave up its strife,
- And gurgled down and down.
- But angels say, on yesterday,
- Just as the dawn was red,
- One little boat o'erspent with gales
- Retrimmed its masts, redecked its sails
- Exultant, onward sped!
- There's been a death in the opposite house
- As lately as to-day.
- I know it by the numb look
- Such houses have alway.
- The neighbors rustle in and out,
- The doctor drives away.
- A window opens like a pod,
- Abrupt, mechanically;
- Somebody flings a mattress out,--
- The children hurry by;
- They wonder if It died on that,--
- I used to when a boy.
- The minister goes stiffly in
- As if the house were his,
- And he owned all the mourners now,
- And little boys besides;
- And then the milliner, and the man
- Of the appalling trade,
- To take the measure of the house.
- There 'll be that dark parade
- Of tassels and of coaches soon;
- It 's easy as a sign,--
- The intuition of the news
- In just a country town.
- We never know we go,--when we are going
- We jest and shut the door;
- Fate following behind us bolts it,
- And we accost no more.
- 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.
- Water is taught by thirst;
- Land, by the oceans passed;
- Transport, by throe;
- Peace, by its battles told;
- Love, by memorial mould;
- Birds, by the snow.
- We thirst at fast,--'t is Nature's act;
- And later, when we die,
- A little water supplicate
- Of fingers going by.
- It intimates the finer want,
- Whose adequate supply
- Is that great water in the west
- Termed immortality.
- A clock stopped--not the mantel's;
- Geneva's farthest skill
- Can't put the puppet bowing
- That just now dangled still.
- An awe came on the trinket!
- The figures hunched with pain,
- Then quivered out of decimals
- Into degreeless noon.
- It will not stir for doctors,
- This pendulum of snow;
- The shopman importunes it,
- While cool, concernless No
- Nods from the gilded pointers,
- Nods from the seconds slim,
- Decades of arrogance between
- The dial life and him.
- All overgrown by cunning moss,
- All interspersed with weed,
- The little cage of 'Currer Bell,'
- In quiet Haworth laid.
- This bird, observing others,
- When frosts too sharp became,
- Retire to other latitudes,
- Quietly did the same,
- But differed in returning;
- Since Yorkshire hills are green,
- Yet not in all the nests I meet
- Can nightingale be seen.
- Gathered from many wanderings,
- Gethsemane can tell
- Through what transporting anguish
- She reached the asphodel!
- Soft fall the sounds of Eden
- Upon her puzzled ear;
- Oh, what an afternoon for heaven,
- When 'Brontë' entered there!
- A toad can die of light!
- Death is the common right
- Of toads and men,--
- Of earl and midge
- The privilege.
- Why swagger then?
- The gnat's supremacy
- Is large as thine.
- Far from love the Heavenly Father
- Leads the chosen child;
- Oftener through realm of briar
- Than the meadow mild,
- Oftener by the claw of dragon
- Than the hand of friend,
- Guides the little one predestined
- To the native land.
- A long, long sleep, a famous sleep
- That makes no show for dawn
- By stretch of limb or stir of lid,--
- An independent one.
- Was ever idleness like this?
- Within a hut of stone
- To bask the centuries away
- Nor once look up for noon?
- 'T was just this time last year I died.
- I know I heard the corn,
- When I was carried by the farms,--
- It had the tassels on.
- I thought how yellow it would look
- When Richard went to mill;
- And then I wanted to get out,
- But something held my will.
- I thought just how red apples wedged
- The stubble's joints between;
- And carts went stooping round the fields
- To take the pumpkins in.
- I wondered which would miss me least,
- And when Thanksgiving came,
- If father 'd multiply the plates
- To make an even sum.
- And if my stocking hung too high,
- Would it blur the Christmas glee,
- That not a Santa Claus could reach
- The altitude of me?
- But this sort grieved myself, and so
- I thought how it would be
- When just this time, some perfect year,
- Themselves should come to me.
- On this wondrous sea,
- Sailing silently,
- Ho! pilot, ho!
- Knowest thou the shore
- Where no breakers roar,
- Where the storm is o'er?
- In the silent west
- Many sails at rest,
- Their anchors fast;
- Thither I pilot thee,--
- Land, ho! Eternity!
- Ashore at last!
Dickinson, Emily. 1896. Poems.