If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall…

The poem is a single sentence of seven short lines, and these are its first four. The speaker sets herself a modest measure of a worthwhile life: to stop one heart from breaking, to ease one life’s aching or cool one pain. The list ends on the smallest kindness of all, helping “one fainting robin / Unto his nest again”, and the poem closes by repeating its promise: “I shall not live in vain.”

Emily Dickinson wrote it, probably in the mid-1860s, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent almost all her life. Only a handful of her poems were printed while she lived. After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found the poems she had kept, many of them sewn into small handmade booklets, and this one appeared in 1890 in the first collection of her work.

It is one of her plainest poems, far from the daring compression of her best-known work, and it is often quoted to honour quiet, everyday kindness.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, first lines (written c. 1864), 1890

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work