Revolution is the pod (33)
Revolution is the pod
Systems rattle from;
When the winds of
Will are stirred,
Excellent is bloom.
But except its russet
Base
Every summer be
The entomber of itself;
So of Liberty.
Left inactive on the
Stalk,
All its purple fled,
Revolution shakes it
For
Test if it be dead.
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.