On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson’s “Safe in Their Alabaster

Chambers” was published. This was the second of only a handful of

poems to appear in Dickinson’s lifetime, all of them anonymously

and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent

her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Are

you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

Safe in their alabaster chambers,

Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,

Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,

Rafter of satin, and roof of stone. . . .

Today in Literature