Glee! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

Emily is said to have carried a pencil and scraps of paper in her pocket in order to always be prepared when a poem came her way.

~  “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”  ~
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Image of Emily Dickinson – from the daguerreotype taken circa 1848. (my frame)
Poem – Emily Dickinson. Complete Poems. 1924.