Emily Dickinson

Bequest

BEQUEST.

Legal inheritance language

The poem starts like a will being read. Dickinson uses legal terminology throughout—'bequest,' 'legacies,' 'offer'—to formalize what's actually an emotional wound.

You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

Conditional theology

Even God would be satisfied with this love—'Had He the offer of' it. She's claiming the departed's love exceeds divine love itself.

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,

Spatial impossibility

'Between eternity and time' places the gap in metaphysical space, not physical distance. Death hasn't just separated them—it's put them in different categories of existence.

Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Double Inheritance

The poem's structure mirrors a legal document—specifically a will's reading where beneficiaries learn what they've inherited. But Dickinson lists two legacies that contradict each other: love and pain. The first legacy (lines 2-4) is so valuable that even God would be content with it. The second legacy (lines 5-8) is pain so vast it's 'Capacious as the sea.'

The legal language does real work here. 'Bequest' and 'legacies' are terms for what you inherit after someone dies—Dickinson is inventorying what death leaves behind. Notice she doesn't say 'you died' or 'you passed away.' She says 'You left me'—making departure sound almost voluntary, like the person chose to leave her these things.

The turn happens at 'You left me boundaries of pain.' 'Boundaries' is the key word—not just pain, but the *limits* of pain, its outer edges. She's inherited a territory of suffering so large she can't see across it. The sea comparison isn't decorative—it's measurement. She's trying to quantify something infinite.

Consciousness Split by Death

The final line is where the poem's real violence happens: 'Your consciousness and me.' Death hasn't just created physical distance—it's separated two consciousnesses that were once connected. The departed is now 'between eternity and time,' existing in a different temporal category than the living speaker.

Dickinson often wrote about death as a problem of communication—the dead can't speak back, can't confirm they still love you, can't be reached. This poem makes that gap geometric: there's a measurable space 'Between eternity and time,' and inside that space sits the departed's consciousness, permanently out of reach.

The poem's compression is characteristic of Dickinson—eight lines to describe a complete metaphysics of loss. She's not interested in describing grief's feeling (though the poem is saturated with it). She's mapping grief's architecture: what you inherit, where the dead go, what separates you from them. The love is real, the pain is real, and the gap between consciousnesses is unbridgeable. That's the bequest.