Emily's Creative Process

On the inside flap of one envelope, she wrote, In this short life that only lasts an hour, how much her little is within our power. There are dozens like this. But as I was exploring these charming envelope poems, I stumbled on something even more remarkable. On the handwritten version, the word only is stacked on top of the word merely. If we use only merely, that is, twelve syllables on the first line, and ten on the second. That's odd, knowing Emily's propensity for adhering to meter,. When I saw this happening in several other poems on these envelopes, words stacked on topof each other, which if read together, completely violate the