Ririro.com - Poetry

The Mystery of Pain is a short Emily Dickinson poem that gives suffering a strange, almost abstract face. In just two stanzas, it describes pain as a blank element that cannot recall its beginning or imagine a day without itself. Time collapses into one endless present, where the past only teaches the mind to expect fresh agonies. It is a quiet, unsettling meditation that lingers long after the la...

The Book of Martyrs by Emily Dickinson is a short poem that invites the reader to open a book of brave lives and draw strength from them. Each stanza turns on a quiet exchange: others strove so that we may grow stouter, and endured so that we may fear less. The second stanza lifts toward faith burning above the fagot, hymns no river could drown, and forgotten names rising into renown. Become a sup...

"To fight aloud is very brave" is a short Emily Dickinson poem that honors the battles no one witnesses. Instead of banners and cheering crowds, it turns to the quiet struggle inside the heart, where a cavalry of woe charges unseen. Its mood is solemn yet tender, its stakes deeply personal. The speaker looks past public glory to those who fall without a country's applause, and imagines a processio...

In The Lonely House, Emily Dickinson's short poem, a narrator eyes isolated houses that a robber would love. Two burglars creep toward a portico, one holding the tools while the other watches for sleepers. Inside, a ticking clock, spectacles, an almanac and a nervous star seem to notice them. The moon slides down the stairs to look, and the tension builds as the house holds its breath until the mo...

Along the Potomac is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that begins with a childhood memory of a woman's death. Years later, her only son goes up from the Potomac, his face all victory, to look upon her grave. The speaker imagines the slow turning of seasons until bullets cut his life short. Pride, Paradise, and the haunting image of mother and son passing through the speaker's mind give the verse a...

"It was too late for man" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that you can read online in about a minute. In two compact stanzas, a speaker faces a moment when human help has failed and creation itself is powerless. Prayer is all that remains. The mood shifts from desperate hush to surprising warmth as heaven is imagined as a refuge, and God becomes a hospitable old neighbor. Quiet, intimate, and s...

"Presentiment is that long shadow" is a four-line poem by Emily Dickinson that turns an ordinary evening into a quiet warning. A shadow stretches across the lawn, and the startled grass senses that darkness is about to pass over it. In just twenty-three words, Dickinson captures the uneasy moment before something changes, when the light is still present but the feeling of loss has already arrived....

In "The Wife," a short poem by Emily Dickinson, a young woman sets aside the playthings of her girlhood to take up the "honorable work" of being a wife. The poem lingers on what she may have lost in the exchange: wonder, ambition, and the gleam of early promise. She never speaks of it. Dickinson compares her silence to the sea, which grows pearl and weed in depths that only the sea itself knows. B...

"Proof" is a short poem in which a lover answers a doubting heart with three quiet, daring claims. The speaker insists that love only began to be real once it was felt, that love and life are one and the same, and that love therefore cannot die. When the beloved still asks for evidence, the speaker offers one final, solemn answer. In just twelve lines, devotion is tested against doubt and sacrific...

Bequest, a short poem by Emily Dickinson, turns a loved one's death into an inheritance of two strange gifts. The speaker is left a love so immense that even a Heavenly Father would accept it, and a vast, sea-wide boundary of pain. In just eight lines, grief becomes a measured distance between time and eternity, between the one who remains and the one who has gone. Quiet, aching and precise. Becom...

"Belshazzar had a letter" is a compact poem that turns the biblical feast of King Belshazzar into a riddle about conscience. In just eight lines, a king receives his only message, written by a mysterious correspondent on a palace wall. Dickinson hints that this warning is one every reader can decipher without spectacles. The mood is wry, solemn and quietly unsettling, built around a single image o...

"Whether my bark went down at sea" is a short poem in which a speaker watches the bay for a vessel that may be lost. Was it wrecked by gales, or carried to enchanted isles on docile sails? The speaker cannot know what mystic mooring holds the ship today. The poem turns on a single, aching image: the eye sent out upon the water, keeping its vigil and holding uncertainty without demanding an answer....

"Dawn" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that captures the quiet moment when night gives way to sunrise. As the sky brightens close enough to touch, the speaker gets ready to greet the day, smoothing hair and readying dimples. Looking back, the midnight that seemed so frightening now feels like a passing worry, only an hour long. In a few lines, it turns relief and morning anticipation into a sma...

"The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman" is a short poem in which Emily Dickinson imagines Christ's journey to Earth on a bitterly cold day. The speaker marvels at his gentleness in coming so far for "little Fellowmen." Then the poem turns, measuring the road to Bethlehem against the vast distance that now separates the speaker from that boyhood. In two brief stanzas, wonder and quiet doubt...

"A brief, but patient illness" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that turns a death into a small woodland funeral. A swift illness passes, and by morning a beloved girl is among the angels. The procession is brief, a Bobolink stands by, and an aged Bee addresses the mourners before they kneel. The speaker's quiet plea to follow Summer, Sister and Seraph balances grief against tenderness. Become a...

"A charm invests a face" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson about a veiled lady who hesitates at the edge of a meeting. A glimpse through her mesh gives her an imperfect image, and she is torn between wishing and denying. In eight compact lines, Dickinson sets up a quiet standoff between desire and its fulfilment. Will she lift the veil, or does the dream satisfy her more than the truth could? Bec...

"A chilly Peace infests the Grass" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that turns a quiet patch of ground into something unsettling. A cold stillness settles over the grass, the sun lies down in respect, and the shadows seem to study the scene. Dickinson's eerie, hushed tone leaves one question hanging: whose resting place is this, where all of humankind arrives from every sea? Read it in under a m...

"A clock stopped—not the mantel's" is an Emily Dickinson poem that watches a life end through the image of a failing timepiece. A puppet-like figure freezes mid-bow, the numbers hunch in pain, and the pendulum turns to snow. Doctors and a pleading shopman can do nothing against a cool, unmoved "No." In four short stanzas, Dickinson sets the tiny ticking of the dial against the vast stillness of de...

"A Cloud withdrew from the Sky" is a short poem in which a speaker watches a glorious cloud and its attendants vanish for good. Regret hangs over every line: had the speaker looked longer and stored that glow in memory, it might still offer comfort. Instead, a resolve forms to never again pass an angel with a mere glance and a bow. In just twelve lines, wonder turns into a quiet vow. Become a supp...

"A Coffin — is a small Domain" is a short poem that sets the smallest of spaces against the largest of ideas. In three compact stanzas, Emily Dickinson's speaker measures a coffin and a grave, then finds both wider than the sun, the seas and the lands. The mood is hushed and contemplative, yet strangely expansive. The tension lies in the contrast between a "diminished Plane" and the boundless reac...

"A Counterfeit — a Plated Person —" is a short poem in which Emily Dickinson refuses to live as a fake, whatever flaws may lie beneath her nature. In just a few lines, the speaker sets truth against lies, comparing honesty to good health, safety and open sky. A lie becomes a meagre exile, one that still speaks when we die. Compact and sharply worded, it asks what kind of self you are willing to be...

"A curious Cloud surprised the Sky" is a short poem that turns an ordinary sky into a small drama. A strange, antlered cloud drifts in against a sheet of blue, hanging so low it nearly brushes the lawns. Then it changes. It rises, grows statelier, and trails away like royal robes. In just a few lines, Dickinson's playful wonder gives way to awe, and the speaker compares the cloud to a queen. Becom...

"Above Oblivion's Tide there is a Pier" is a compact poem that imagines a lone refuge rising over the waters of forgetting. Only an unnamed "Few" reach it, and the speaker insists they are not carried there but lift themselves. Fame, personified as armless and offering a single meagre smile, cannot help them. In just a few lines, Dickinson sets the lasting against the fleeting, and asks who truly...

"Abraham to kill him—" is a short poem that retells the biblical sacrifice of Isaac with dry, startling wit. An aged Abraham is told to kill his son, the boy an "Urchin," and he complies without a flicker of hesitation. Dickinson's clipped dashes turn obedience into a question of flattery and tyranny. The final stanza adds a sly moral about a mastiff and manners, leaving readers to decide how seri...

"Absence disembodies—so does Death" is a compact Emily Dickinson poem that weighs two kinds of vanishing against each other. A loved one's absence and the finality of death both hide a person from the Earth, yet the speaker finds that superposition and love may soften the loss. Spare and quietly aching, the lines ask whether tenderness fades the more we try to prove it, leaving readers with a ques...