with red ink this evening came a letter from my own heart
writing in illness that sudden back-country without any pleasure
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 11 June 1662.
The speaker imagines receiving a letter in the evening, written in red ink, and the surprise is who sent it: their own heart. Red is the color of blood and warning marks, so the image suggests something urgent, maybe painful, arriving from inside the body rather than from the outside world.
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