Quote
By Emily Dickinson
If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain; / If I can ease one life the aching, / Or cool one pain, / Or help one fainting robin / Unto his nest again, / I shall not live in vain.
- Source
- Poems by Emily Dickinson (first series), 1890 · Book I, Life, no. VI, p. 18
- Read at
- Internet Archive (scan of the Roberts Brothers edition, Boston, 1890)
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About this quote
The whole of an untitled poem from Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890), Book I, Life, no. VI. The early editors changed some of her punctuation and wording, so this is the 1890 text, not her manuscript. Verse lines are separated by a slash (/).