Emily Dickinson’s “Will There Really Be a Morning” is a poem about her relationship with meaning itself, and with, one might say, God. What is the absolute “morning”? How do abstract concepts or ideals relate to lived experience? What is the role of language in mediating that? And how can we all be seekers for these ideals and these lived realities both?
Will There Really Be a Morning?
Emily Dickinson
Will there really be a “Morning”?
Is there such a thing as “Day”?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?
Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Men from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called “Morning” lies!
Writing Prompts Inspired by “Will There Really Be a Morning”?
What does the word “morning” mean to you? How does the ideal interact with the specifics of your own life?
Emily Dickinson‘s “Will There Really Be a Morning,” like so many of her poems, is both playful and serious, and asks us to reconsider what we think we know so that our reading itself becomes a kind of new beginning.
To read more morning poems, or poems of transition of any kind, come on over to my blog post for 15 good morning poems.