In Ebon Box, When Years Have Flown
poem 169
In Ebon Box, When Years Have Flown - context Summary
Published in 1896 Edition
Published in the 1896 Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series 1, the poem imagines opening an "ebon box" years later to reverently inspect relics of love and youth. Letters, a shriveled flower, a curl and trinket surface as fading evidence that once "quickened us like Wine." The speaker rehearses memory as a gentle, ritualized retrieval followed by composed detachment, suggesting both tenderness toward the past and a deliberate return to everyday life.
Read Complete AnalysesIn Ebon Box, when years have flown To reverently peer, Wiping away the velvet dust Summers have sprinkled there! To hold a letter to the light Grown Tawny now, with time To con the faded syllables That quickened us like Wine! Perhaps a Flower’s shrivelled check Among its stores to find Plucked far away, some morning By gallant mouldering hand! A curl, perhaps, from foreheads Our Constancy forgot Perhaps, an Antique trinket In vanished fashions set! And then to lay them quiet back And go about its care As if the little Ebon Box Were none of our affair!
Feel free to be first to leave comment.