Emily Dickinson's If You Were Coming In The Fall

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Throughout American history there have been many famous poets that have left a significant mark on American culture during their time. One of the most influential is Emily Dickinson. However; the mass majority of her poems were not published until after her death. Many of these poems have mesmerized the people who read them at what she could actually be writing about because of her use of different tones and moods. One of the most famous of her poems is called ¨If You Were Coming in the Fall¨ because of her distinctive use of different poetic devices. The poem “If You Were Coming in the Fall” by Emily Dickinson is about love and shows how love can make one believe that death is an option without their significant other in their life by using …show more content…
All through Dickinson’s poem “If You Were Coming in the Fall,” she uses metaphors along with her repetitive use of different time periods that display that she is nonchalant and patient on the topic of waiting for her significant other’s return. The most unconcerned metaphor Dickinson in this poem uses is when she is talking about how she would deal with a summers wait by “brushing the summer by with half a smile and half a spurn, as housewives do a fly” (Dickinson 2-4). However, in the last stanza, Dickinson’s attitude towards her significant other’s arrival by pronouncing that “but, now, / uncertain of the length, / Of this, that is between. / It goads me, like the Goblin Bee” (Dickinson 17-20).. This drastic shift in attitude demonstrates the theme of the poem by stating that she will willingly wait as long as it takes for her significant other’s return, even if it means death. Lilia Melani comments on this in her analysis of “If You Were Coming in the Fall” by insisting that “she deals with her reality, which is a frightening one. She calls time "uncertain"; she does not know (is "ignorant") what time or timelessness is or will bring. Her ignorance distresses or "goads" her. She uses the metaphor of a wing for the length of time to pass. The threatening potential of time continues the wing metaphor in her comparison of time to a "goblin bee,” (Melani). Her explanation of the final stanza demonstrates the anxiety and stress Dickinson is attempting to display through her constant use of metaphors that involve time. These feelings over her significant other is what leads her to believe that death is an option with them because her anxiety makes life so unbearable without
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