Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth.

These lines come from one of Emily Dickinson’s short, aphoristic poems on love’s metaphysical scope, written during her most productive Amherst years (mid-19th century) and circulated primarily in manuscript rather than print. Dickinson often framed abstract concepts—love, death, eternity—in quasi-scientific or logical language (“anterior,” “posterior,” “exponent”), reflecting both the era’s intellectual climate and her own habit of testing spiritual claims against the diction of proof and definition. The poem belongs to her recurring project of redefining religious and cosmological ideas in intensely compressed lyric statements, where punctuation and capitalization function as part of the argument.

Dickinson asserts that love precedes life and outlasts death, positioning it as a principle more fundamental than biological existence. By calling love the “Initial of Creation,” she casts it as the first cause or originating force, while “The Exponent of Earth” suggests love is what makes earthly life legible—an interpretive key that reveals meaning, like an exponent in mathematics clarifying magnitude. The poem’s paradoxical, almost doctrinal structure reads like a miniature creed, but one grounded less in institutional theology than in Dickinson’s private metaphysics: love is not merely an emotion but the organizing law of being, spanning origin, mortality, and the world’s intelligibility.