"This is My Letter to the World"

By Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

This is my letter to the world,

    That never wrote to me, --,

The simple news that Nature told,

    With tender majesty..

Her message is committed,

    To hands I cannot see;

For love of her, sweet countrymen,

    Judge tenderly of me!

Drawn from page 19 of the Dover Edition of Selected Poems of Emily Dickenson

Literature, as an extension of langue, communicates.  Or that was what it was intended to do:  Language is God’s gift to us to communicate and through that process bring us together.. However, humans have too often used language to delineate, to put people into “their place.”