'As imperceptibly as Grief'

Thanks to Garrison Keillor for calling our attention to this sublime poem. On this deeply troubling Election Day, this poem calls us to a deeper and wider sense of reality; like love, in Richard Wilbur’s poem, it calls us to the things of this world. But it also summons us to a time and a place in which nature draws into itself (“Nature spending with herself/Sequestered Afternoon) for peace and solace and, yes, a companionable afternoon visit. It’s a place so beautiful that beautiful Summer itself flees to it when the season is done.

Read it very slowly, and note the barely perceptible music of Emily Dickinson’s rhyming:

Sequestered Afternoon—
The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—

As imperceptibly as Grief
by Emily Dickinson

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last,
To seem like Perfidy—
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—
The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.