Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (124)

By Emily Dickinson 1830–1886 Emily Dickinson

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -

Untouched by Morning -

and untouched by noon -

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,

Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone -

Grand go the Years,

In the Crescent above them -

Worlds scoop their Arcs -

and Firmaments - row -

Diadems - drop -

And Doges surrender -

Soundless as Dots,

On a Disk of Snow.

Dickinson poems are electronically reproduced courtesy of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University of Press, Copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Biography

A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in . . .

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