Emily Dickinson

If I shouldn’t be alive

Summary


"If I shouldn't be alive" is a short poem in which a speaker imagines their own death and leaves one tender request: when the robins return, give the one in the red cravat a memorial crumb. Two compact stanzas balance gentle humor with quiet mortality. The speaker pictures thanking a friend through a "granite lip," and that image makes gratitude feel stubborn and lasting. Can silence still say thank you?

Listen to audio


Read Online

If I shouldn’t be alive
When the robins come,
Give the one in red cravat
A memorial crumb.

If I couldn’t thank you,
Being just asleep,
You will know I’m trying
With my granite lip!

Add Ririro as a Preferred Source on Google
Related tags
, , , , , , ,

Credits

Emily Dickinson was a reclusive 19th-century American poet, famed for her compressed, dash-filled verse and her unflinching meditations on death and nature. Here, her habit of finding the extraordinary in small creatures shows in a robin cast as a dapper guest at her own memorial.