You Left Me Sire Two Legacies

You Left Me Sire Two Legacies - context Summary

Composed 1862; Published 1914

This brief lyric was written in 1862 and first published posthumously in 1914 in the collection The Single Hound. Its two short stanzas present a personal bequest: an offered legacy of love contrasted with vast "Boundaries of Pain." Placed against Dickinson’s mid‑19th‑century manuscripts, the poem fits her private, epistolary mode—compact lines that frame intimacy and estrangement as inheritable conditions. The gap between composition and publication also shaped readers’ reception, introducing the work to an audience decades after Dickinson’s life and editorial shaping of her oeuvre.