At Length
Emily Dickinson · 1891
Public domain
From Poems by Emily Dickinson, published in 1891. The text is free of copyright in the United States. This copy is the poem, without the Project Gutenberg header.
Her final summer was it,
And yet we guessed it not;
If tenderer industriousness
Pervaded her, we thought
A further force of life
Developed from within, --
When Death lit all the shortness up,
And made the hurry plain.
We wondered at our blindness, --
When nothing was to see
But her Carrara guide-post, --
At our stupidity,
When, duller than our dulness,
The busy darling lay,
So busy was she, finishing,
So leisurely were we!