Dickinson claimed one human heart outweighs infinity, in only eight lines
Emily Dickinson opens by admitting that life is great and the afterlife greater, since it is infinite. Then she flips the scale: once every space and every kingdom has been displayed, a single small human heart shrinks the whole lot to nothing. It is a cosmic argument settled in eight short lines.
The poem is built like a proof with a twist. The first stanza lays out an ordinary ranking. Present life is impressive; the life to come beats it, and the speaker says we know this because it is Infinity. So far, nothing a Sunday sermon would dispute. The second stanza accepts that vast premise and then overturns it. Imagine all of Space surveyed and every Dominion put on show, she says; even then, "The smallest Human Heart's extent" is enough to shrink it to nothing. The inner world wins against the outer one, however large the outer one gets.
The logic is deliberately cheeky. Infinity should be the largest thing there is, yet the poem measures it against feeling and declares it smaller. Capital letters on Life, Space, Dominion and Heart make each word a kind of character, and the rhymes pair "see" with "Infinity" and "shown" with "none", so the last sound of the poem is emptiness.
Readers in Dickinson's day never saw poems like this in her own form. Of nearly 1,800 she wrote, only 10 appeared in print while she lived. Hardly anyone around her knew about the rest until her younger sister Lavinia found them in her desk after her death in 1886. A first selection came out in 1890; its editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, reshaped the poems to suit the tastes of the period.
Her own dashes, capitals and slanted rhymes had to wait until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson gathered the complete poems in a single edition that restored them much closer to what she intended. That collection won wide praise for its originality, and the woman from Amherst is now counted among the canonical American poets.
Source: The Life we have is very great.
