The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

We never know how high we are till we are called to rise. Then if we are true to form our statures touch the skies.

The sun just touched the morning; The morning, happy thing, Supposed that he had come to dwell, And life would be all spring.

Those who have not found the heaven below, will fail of it above.

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.

That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet.

The Poets light but Lamps- Themselves-go out-

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

Forever – is composed of Nows – ‘Tis not a different time – Except for Infiniteness – And Latitude of Home –

Come slowly, Eden! Lips unused to thee, Bashful, sip thy jasmines, As the fainting bee, Reaching late his flower, Round her chamber hums, Counts his nectars—enters, And is lost in balms!

I had a daily bliss I half indifferent viewed, Till sudden I perceived it stir,— It grew as I pursued, Till when, around a crag, It wasted from my sight, Enlarged beyond my utmost scope, I learned its sweetness right.

A little road not made of man, Enabled of the eye, Accessible to thill of bee, Or cart of butterfly. If town it have, beyond itself, ’T is that I cannot say; I only sigh,—no vehicle Bears me along that way.

Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain.

Down Time’s quaint stream Without an oar, We are enforced to sail, Our Port—a secret— Our Perchance—a gale. What Skipper would Incur the risk, What Buccaneer would ride, Without a surety from the wind Or schedule of the tide?

The brain within its groove Runs evenly and true; But let a splinter swerve, ’T were easier for you To put the water back When floods have slit the hills, And scooped a turnpike for themselves, And blotted out the mills!

Victory comes late, And is held low to freezing lips Too rapt with frost To take it.

Experiment to me Is every one I meet. If it contain a kernel? The figure of a nut Presents upon a tree, Equally plausibly; But meat within is requisite, To squirrels and to me.

I years had been from home, And now, before the door, I dared not open, lest a face I never saw before Stare vacant into mine And ask my business there. My business,—just a life I left, Was such still dwelling there?

For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy. For each beloved hour Sharp pittances of years, Bitter contested farthings And coffers heaped with tears.

Sweet hours have perished here; This is a mighty room; Within its precincts hopes have played,— Now shadows in the tomb.

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!

To wander now is my abode; To rest,—to rest would be A privilege of hurricane To memory and me.