In the course of a famously reclusive life, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) must herself have developed a sense of time that was not, as today’s Poem of the Day suggests, strictly measured out in “Anno Dominies.” The house in which she spent her adult life became for her an enclosed but imaginatively infinite world, in which the dramas of her poems found “latitude” to unfold, with the voice that is so uniquely their own. These hymn-meter quatrains, rhymed aslant in the second and fourth lines, give us Dickinson’s curious start-and-stop diction, with its em dashes like gasps, the shy person‘s struggle for precise language to articulate an acutely private interior-life experience. What is at stake in this poem is the speaker’s perception of a life, or afterlife, outside time: not marked off in days, months, and years, but an eternal present, always now.  

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 Debate — or Pause — 
Or Celebrated Days — 
No different Our Years would be 
From Anno Dominies —

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.