Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers

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. Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence,--
Ah, what sagacity perished here! Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

My high school English teacher, Mr. Marcinec, once asked our class, "Can poetry be judged on merit alone, or is the life of the poet applicable?" Easy answer. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts of goodly parents. She grew up with the irrational, deeply held conviction that all lives are equal. Years after the Civil War, she wrote the lines above on a scrap of paper and sent it to her longtime correspondent and friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Higginson was a pre-war abolitionist who became the first commander of African-American troops in 1864, the South Carolina Volunteers. It was he who documented their Gullah dialect, wrote Life in a Black Regiment in 1870, and later recorded their spirituals. Dickinson wrote the poem as a memorial to the escaped slaves who had died assaulting the Vaubanite earthworks in the South as cannon fodder, and to whom some white monuments were eventually erected around Cambridge after the war. The poem doesn't make much sense unless you've stood in front of one of those monuments, and in front of Higginson's house.