Caring/Compassion; Grief/Loss

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.