Today’s Poem: Forever Is Composed of Nows

Emily Dickinson, eternity, and the birthday that never comes

Carstian Luyckx, Allegory of Time in a Wreath of Flowers, 1650 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

Forever Is Composed of Nows

by Emily Dickinson

Forever is composed of Nows —
’Tis not a different time, 
Except for infiniteness  
And latitude of home.

From this, experienced here, 
Remove the dates to these. 
Let months dissolve in further months,
And years exhale in years. 
 
Without certificate or pause  
Or celebrated days, 
As infinite our years would be 
As Anno Domini’s.
═══════════════════════

In the course of her repeated imaginative explorations of the experience of eternity, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) must herself have developed a sense of time that was not, as Today’s Poem suggests, strictly measured out in “Anno Dominies.” Today, time-bound as we are, we anticipate her own “Celebrated Day” and “Year” — her birthday tomorrow, December 10, which continues to mean something to us, if not to her in the infinite hereafter.

To Dickinson in her own time-bounded life — spent chiefly in Amherst, Massachusetts and, increasingly, in seclusion with her family — days and seasons meant much. Her letters are full of anniversaries, birthdays, and death days, as well as the larger turns of the year with their accompanying natural and botanical interest. The dramas that drive many of her poems are of this sort: keen observations of the world in time. Yet questions about a reality beyond time, a world she could not directly observe except in death, continually obsessed her.

“Forever Is Composed of Nows” was one of the poems Dickinson’s sister Lavinia withheld from publication by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who together edited editions of the poems in the 1890s. Those poems kept back by Lavinia Dickinson came to light in 1928, and appeared in 1929 under the title Further Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Like the poems edited by Higginson and Todd, the poems in this collection have undergone some judicious smoothing of what its editors, Alfred Leete Hampson and Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, surely have considered to be rough edges. Therefore the version of the poem we share here today (compare with this restored version) lacks the spiky eccentricities of Dickinson’s now-familiar poetic voice, with its emphatic capitalizations and its em-dashes breaking up the diction, as though a shy person struggled for precise language to articulate an intensity of inner experience.

Otis Allen Bullard, Emily Elizabeth, Austin, and Lavinia Dickinson, c. 1840 (Wikimedia Commons)

The wording of the last stanza, too, has been altered. The claim, presumably in Dickinson’s original, that the “Our Years” in eternity would be “no different” from “Anno Dominies” — in other words, that the timelessness of eternity is the true “Year of the Lord” — becomes instead a comparison, the “Anno Domini” merely a figure rather than a larger reality, understood only outside the bounds of time.

But they have preserved her hymn-measure, or common-meter, quatrains: different, as Joseph Bottum has pointed out, from the ballad stanza, which observes the same metrical pattern. The ballad stanza derives from the English folk tradition, with actual traditional ballads sometimes varying the template of alternating tetrameter-trimeter abcb stanzas. But Emily Dickinson’s most characteristic quatrain, with its similarly alternating metrical structure and its abab rhymes, draws instead on the more formalized model of the pietist hymn.

Unwilling, herself, ever to commit to “renouncing the world” and joining the Congregationalist church at Amherst, Dickinson instead composed strange, alternative hymns, such as Today’s Poem. This poem, like so many others, strips away the certainties and consolations of piety to look, nakedly, at the implications of believing (as Dickinson clearly did, despite her reservations about church) in eternal life.

What is at stake in this poem is the speaker’s perception of a life, or afterlife, outside time. Eternity is not marked off in days, months, and years, but is an ongoing present, always now — the now, in fact, that we are already entering and experiencing at every moment. The only difference in eternity is that being outside time, in an ongoing now, we never arrive at any particular time: a birthday, for example.

If eternity is a room without walls, defined only by its “infiniteness,” the decor might strike the one who contemplates it as perhaps a little bleak. The limits that time imposes — the fading of flowers, the inexorability of growing older each year — enable the very beauties that this contemplative might conceivably miss in eternal life. It’s only the rest of us, here in the temporal anteroom, who can look forward, with pleasure or regret or some poignant mingling of both, to Emily Dickinson’s turning a hundred and ninety-four tomorrow.

---

---