On Truth, Beauty, And Death

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

-Emily Dickinson, "I Died For Beauty -but was scarce," in , The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Bianchi and Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1937), 161.