Forever is composed of Nows (25)
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.
From The Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. This poem is in the public domain.
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. While she was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. She died in Amherst in 1886, and the first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890.