And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—our names—

These lines come from one of Emily Dickinson’s compact, allegorical poems in which death and burial are rendered as a strangely intimate social encounter. Written in the mid-1860s (Dickinson’s most prolific period) and circulated in manuscript rather than published in her lifetime, the poem imagines the speaker already interred, encountering another dead person “as Kinsmen.” Dickinson frequently drew on the material culture of 19th‑century New England death—family graves, moss-covered stones, and the slow erasure of names—to explore how time alters identity and memory. The setting is implicitly a graveyard or burial vault, with “Rooms” suggesting adjacent graves or compartments.

The poem turns death into a muted conversation across boundaries: the dead “talk” not face-to-face but “between the Rooms,” as if separated by walls of earth or coffin boards. Calling the other dead person “Kinsmen” suggests a leveling kinship created by mortality—death makes strangers into family by placing them in the same condition. The most chilling image is time’s quiet work: moss rises to the lips, silencing speech, and eventually “covered up—our names—,” evoking both literal gravestone weathering and the broader obliteration of personal identity. Dickinson’s dashes and pauses mimic the halting, fading voice of the dead and the slow, inevitable encroachment of forgetting.