A Poem I Love: Debra San

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1896), Complete Poems, 1924, XXXIII

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Writes Professor Emerita Debra San:

Sometimes life’s burdens and obligations, even the presence of other
people, weigh too heavily on us, and how pleasant it is to fantasize
being free of all that, free to just wander along without a care in the
world, like Dickinson’s happy little stone. It lives its life “in casual
simplicity,” and so does the form of the poem itself, with its rhymes in
couplets and its lines short. It’s a marriage of form and content. But,
as always with Dickinson, there’s a hint of something disturbing under
the surface. The stone is happy because it’s free of burdens, but only
as the result of unknowingly complying with “absolute decree,” the
inviolable will of nature or the deity. Are we as humans also fulfilling
“absolute decree”? Would we be willing to sacrifice free will to
experience the happiness of the little stone?  What seems so casually
simple may not be so simple after all.