The Entombment

Edward Burne-Jones executed this study of the Entombment of Christ in 1879, working in bodycolor (gouache) in green, blue, and brown with touches of reddish pigment, heightened with white. Measuring roughly 30 by 48 centimeters, it belongs to the Met's Drawings and Prints department and entered the collection in 1963 as a gift of Mrs. Darwin S. Morse.

Burne-Jones (1833–1898), born in Birmingham and later based in Fulham, was an English painter and designer closely tied to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in style and subject. He was created a baronet, the first of his line.

The horizontal format and the choice of a religious subject reflect the Pre-Raphaelite interest in medieval and devotional imagery that characterized much of his output.

Background drawn from The Met & Wikipedia

Emily Dickinson published almost nothing during her lifetime and was largely unknown as a poet; her work only became widely read after her death and is now regarded as canonical. The Poetry Foundation credits her with creating "a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized."

This short poem exemplifies that ellipsis. It recalls a child's misunderstanding of death: noticing that people "disappeared," the child assumed they had traveled to "remote / Or settled Regions wild," not grasping that they had died. The final lines turn on the "Fact withheld" from the child — the reality of death kept from young understanding.

The poem's compression and its characteristic use of dashes are typical of Dickinson's style. Its subject — death, and how it is perceived or concealed — is among the recurring concerns of her work.

Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia