YOU left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
Bequest
Summary
Bequest, a short poem by Emily Dickinson, turns a loved one's death into an inheritance of two strange gifts. The speaker is left a love so immense that even a Heavenly Father would accept it, and a vast, sea-wide boundary of pain. In just eight lines, grief becomes a measured distance between time and eternity, between the one who remains and the one who has gone. Quiet, aching and precise.
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