Emily Dickinson

Time Feels So Vast That Were It Not

poem 802

Time Feels So Vast That Were It Not - meaning Summary

Vastness Versus Finite Self

The poem contrasts human finitude with the boundless sense of time. The speaker says time feels so vast that, without eternity as a safeguard, temporal circumference would overwhelm individual limits. The closing lines shift to a divine observer who, through processes of enlargement, readies himself to embrace the full "Stupendous Vision" of vastness. The poem meditates on scale: personal limitation versus a transcendent capacity to contain the infinite.

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Time feels so vast that were it not For an Eternity I fear me this Circumference Engross my Finity To His exclusion, who prepare By Processes of Size For the Stupendous Vision Of his diameters

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