Immortality

Photograph by Gene Tatroe


Perhaps one of my favorite poets is Emily Dickinson.  She admired the poetry of three other favorite poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats.  Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice.  While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime.  The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955.  She died in Amherst in 1886.


Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. In many of her poems she writes about the soul being without form and endless.  This was a big part of Dickinson's poetry.

The following is on the Theme of Immortality:

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labour, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,

Their lessons scarcely done;

We passed the fields of gazing grain,

We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible,

The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses' heads

Were toward eternity.

*

This Quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies

This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies

And lads and girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,

And frocks and curls;

This passive place a summer's nimble mansion,

Where bloom and bees

Fulfilled their oriental circuit,

Then ceased like these.