While “it” is alive –
Until Death – touches it –
While “it” and I – lap
one – Air –
Dwell in one Blood –
Under one Firmament –
Show me Division – +could +can
split – or pare!
+Faith – is like Death +Love
+Only, the longer – +Merely
+Faith – is like Death +Love
During – the Grave –
+Faith – is the Fellow of the Resurrection, +Love
Scooping up the Dust –
And chanting – Live!
Link to EDA manuscript. Originally in Amherst Manuscript #set 89. First published in Bingham, Ancestors’ Brocades (1945), 98; Bolts of Melody (1945), 178, entire, as two quatrains. Courtesy of Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.
This poem illustrates Dickinson’s use of free verse. It is unrhymed and uses meter but has no metrical norm or pattern. It creates its cohesion through repetition of words and rhythmic phrases, not through an organized stanza structure: “While it … While it …; Faith/Love is … ”Faith/Love is …” The variant of “love” for “faith” strengthens the interchangeability of these states that many of Dickinson poems encourage.
This free verse poem can be compared and linked to another free verse poem of this period, “It is dead – find it” (F434A, J417), which also makes extensive use of the pronoun “it” as a signifier of the empty or occluded center of many of Dickinson’s poems:
It is dead – Find it –
Out of sound – Out of Sight –
“Happy”? Which is wiser –
You, or the Wind?
“Conscious”? Wont you ask that –
Of the low Ground?“Homesick”? Many met it –
Even through them – This
cannot testify –
Themself – as dumb –
Cristanne Miller observes that Dickinson was familiar with free verse through her admiration for the writing of the British poet, Martin Farquhar Tupper, a predecessor of Whitman in his experimentation with long, unmetered and unrhymed lines. The Dickinson household owned a copy of his Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments (1846), which was inscribed “E. Dickinson” and was marked heavily.
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