SEM453- Caring and Human Experience in Society
Grief and Loss
Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Parting*
My life closed twice before its close
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell,
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
*This poem was written by Emily Dickinson after the deaths of her mother and father which were separated by several years.
The Chariot
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 labor, 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 in 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 towards eternity.
Bequest
You left me, sweet, two legacies,
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had he the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.