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would have left her unborn. She finds it ironic that she owes her life, the source of her sorrow, to God, yet should be admonished to look to God for solace. Of course I prayed - And did God care? He cared as much as On the air A bird had stamped her foot And cried “Give me!” My reason, life, I had not had, but for yourself ’Twere better charity To leave me in the atom's tomb, Merry and nought and gay and numb. Than this smart misery.
Dickinson is regarded as a religious poet. God and theological concepts appear frequently in her work. These two poems indicate that her faith wavered.
Saying her misery is smart may be a way of making fiin of herself — while her feelings are smarting, she is commenting upon her condition smartly, brightly, wittily. When she speaks of being merry and gay in the atom’s tomb, she may have thought she could have been a wildflower in a field, beautiful and unfeeling. In another poem she says the slaying frost attacks the plants all unaware, swiftly, often overnight.
In these brief poems (first published in 1923) we are hardly aware of the small role rhyme and meter play. Near rhymes like “life” and “self,” “tomb” and “numb” seem good enough. It is as if Dickinson believed the drama and power of her thought and expression were too strong to need rhymes to make them memorable.
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