The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth—
The Sweeping up the Heart,
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity.

Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Bustle in a House” reflects her lifelong, intimate acquaintance with death and mourning rituals in mid-19th-century New England. Living much of her adult life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson witnessed frequent bereavements among family and friends and was attentive to the domestic choreography that followed a death—quiet labor, tidying, and the management of grief within the home. The poem distills the “morning after” into a scene of household work that is at once practical and sacred, capturing how Victorian-era mourning often unfolded in private spaces, where women’s domestic duties and emotional caretaking were closely intertwined.

Dickinson treats the ordinary tasks after a death—cleaning, ordering, putting things away—as the most solemn kind of work, because they require the living to begin reorganizing life around an absence. “Sweeping up the Heart” turns grief into a domestic chore, suggesting both the necessity and the violence of emotional containment: love must be carefully stored, not discarded, because it remains real even when it can no longer be “used” in daily reciprocity. The final turn, “Until Eternity,” frames mourning as a temporary suspension rather than an end—hinting at reunion, memory’s persistence, or a metaphysical afterlife in which love becomes usable again.