Emily Dickinson

The Book of Martyrs

Summary


The Book of Martyrs by Emily Dickinson is a short poem that invites the reader to open a book of brave lives and draw strength from them. Each stanza turns on a quiet exchange: others strove so that we may grow stouter, and endured so that we may fear less. The second stanza lifts toward faith burning above the fagot, hymns no river could drown, and forgotten names rising into renown.

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READ, sweet, how others strove,
Till we are stouter;
What they renounced,
Till we are less afraid;
How many times they bore
The faithful witness,
Till we are helped,
As if a kingdom cared!

Read then of faith
That shone above the fagot;
Clear strains of hymn
The river could not drown;
Brave names of men
And celestial women,
Passed out of record
Into renown!

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Credits

Emily Dickinson was a 19th-century American poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, celebrated for her compact, startling verse and her distinctive use of dashes. This poem was written in the 1860s, when she was composing at her most prolific, and it draws on the tradition of Foxe's famous martyrology.