Within my reach!
I could have touched!
I might have chanced that way!
Soft sauntered through the village,
Sauntered as soft away!
So unsuspected violets
Within the fields lie low;
Too late for striving fingers
That passed, an hour ago.
Credits
Emily Dickinson was a 19th-century American poet whose compact, intensely personal verses redefined what a poem could hold. She published almost nothing in her lifetime, yet left behind nearly 1,800 poems discovered after her death. "Almost" is a characteristic example of her gift for distilling vast emotional weight — here, the specific grief of a missed chance — into just a handful of lines.
