“Song of Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1859)

Here is Emerson’s fullest articulation of the Transcendentalist vision of humanity’s oneness with a glorious and powerful natural world that Dickinson celebrates in the opening 10 lines. Nature, whose “oldest force is good as new” (Line 82), Emerson says, reassures him, who like Dickinson struggles with the awareness of death, that nature does not know exhaustion. To borrow from the poem, a thousand sunrises are as one, apples never cease ripening, and rivers never empty. Within that grand energy field, death is irrelevant. “In slumber,” the speaker ultimately concludes, “I am strong” (Line 8).

“It’s Easy to Invent a Life” by Emily Dickinson (year of composition uncertain)

The poem offers one of Dickinson’s most compelling statements about the ephemeral nature of life, how easy lives come and go, how simply we invent purpose and then find that entire enterprise rendered ironic by the inevitability of death. Within God’s grand scheme, individual people can be easily inserted and just as easily slipped out. As with Poem 54, the irony gives the honesty a certain kind of playfulness, a sly sense of humor. Much as the speaker uses the stock market in Poem 54, here God’s creation itself happily suggests the fragility of human endeavor and the irrelevancy of any single life.