“I reason, Earth is short…” (301) by Emily Dickinson
"I reason, Earth is short…" (301)
Emily DickinsonI reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?I reason that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?
MARGINALIA
1.
And here I thought I was fighting a war, trapped inside my head all day. How everything seems microscopic when faced with the world at large.
2.
The alert arrived at the newsroom around four in the afternoon. I got out of bed an hour later, not knowing. At six, words run in a loop on the screen. I am typing at my desk, tapping on my phone, knowing I’m not doing enough.
3.
Asking what the world has come to is like asking why water is wet. But my chest feels heavy just the same, and the question falls from my lips all the same.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson, published by Little, Brown and Company, 1958. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“This comprehensive and authoritative collection of all 1,775 poems by Emily Dickinson is an essential volume for all lovers of American literature.
Only eleven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumous published collections — some of them featuring liberally “edited” versions of the poems — did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson’s extraordinary poetic genius.
This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.
“With its chronological arrangement of the poems, this volume becomes more than just a collection; it is at the same time a poetic biography of the thoughts and feelings of a woman whose beauty was deep and lasting.” —San Francisco Chronicle” (Source)
ABOUT EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England. 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 forty handbound… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: faith • resignation • mortality • Or browse the index
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tjoycec
Thank you for sending out your words these days. It pleases me to see them.
Michelle in NYC
Sending simple love to you and to the larger world in which we are embedded.