Emily Dickinson
1830 · 1886
“A small room, and the whole sky kept inside it.”
Kept by Here After All · open to visitors
Their story
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, and spent almost her whole life in the house where she was born. From that small world she wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems.
She published only a handful in her lifetime, and those without her name. The rest she stitched into little hand-sewn booklets and kept in a drawer, short poems of startling force about death, hope, the soul and a single slant of afternoon light.
Her sister found the booklets after she died in 1886. The first collection appeared in 1890, and the world she had written to began, at last, to write back.
A tribute, kept by Here After All.
Standing here now
You are standing at Emily's plot. Whoever arrives will see you here.
Words spoken here stay only with those standing here. Nothing is recorded.
Remembrances
Where the family and those who loved Emily gather, post, and return. Visitors may leave a tribute in the family's keeping.
The poem Wild nights, wild nights! in her own hand, about 1861. She wrote small and kept close.
A route of evanescence, sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1880. A hummingbird caught in eight lines.
The first edition of Poems, 1890, four years after her death and the first time the world could read her.
The poem I taste a liquor never brewed in her own hand, about 1861.
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers, in her hand, about 1862.
"Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality."
"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all,"