If I should die

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1891

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

The form of Poem 54 is deceptively simple. Each of the poem’s 18 lines is restrained, tidy, and concise. That control is itself an act of defiance against the poem itself, or least against the speaker’s uncertain relationship to her awareness of death. In a poem that tests the intellect struggling to contain and control the emotional vulnerability that comes with thinking about your own death, that meditation is cased in the tidiest of poetic forms. Indeed, the poem does not alter that form even when the poem moves from considering the wonder and order of nature to considering the chaos and confusion of our social and economic constructs.

The poem, however, subtly reveals anxiety in its lack of conventional rhyming. The tidy, often sing-song rhyme in poems is what creates reader buy-in. Clever rhymes become a distraction from whatever the subject of the poem, as the reader delights in the sonic impact of sounds working off other sounds. Here, despite the appearance of a poem, there is no escape into rhyme, no pleasant distraction. The poem thus is left only with the speaker coming to terms with mortality. There are only a few occasional stabs at rhyme (“go” and “below” [Lines 8, 10], for instance, or “fly” and “lie” [Lines 12, 14], or “serene” and “scene” [Lines 16, 18]) to reflect the mind’s unsteady and uncertain state. This unsteady rhyming reveals the anxious feeling of the mind exposed to its own irrelevancy in the face of death. How better to explore the tensions between the concepts of “is” giving way to “was” than by casing that emotional contest in a contested form that can reassure but only against a far more disconcerting reality. Dickinson’s signature use of random capitalization and eccentric punctuation is quieted here—the form is conventional, reflecting the speaker in sobering confrontation with death itself.

Meter

Meter refers to how the poet creates the rhythm in a line of poetry using stressed and unstressed syllables much as a composer creates a line of music through the use of notes with differing time-values. Largely because of the immense emotional and psychological debt Dickinson felt from her upbringing studying the King James Bible of her family’s rooted Protestantism, Dickinson most often used common meter, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables typical of both church hymns and Old Testament psalms. The meter fits Dickinson’s poetic voice. As in those expressions, here the lines alternate between iambic trimeter—that is, three feet, or beats, per line, a beat being a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables. The meter is conversational and plainsong. For instance, in Lines 15 and 16:

It / makes / the / parting / tranquil

And / keeps / the / soul / serene

There are pointed variations. The opening two lines, for instance, state the premise of the poem and therefore stand apart; they have only two beat units each to draw attention to Dickinson’s premise. Other than that, the three beat units define the poem. The lines are tight and concise, except for Line 11, which dwells on the stock market and its continuing viability. That lines lengthen here—Dickinson reflects the chaos of the stock market by permitting that line to extend beyond the pattern of the poem as a way to reflect that chaotic busy-ness. Other than that, the poem uses a reassuring metric pattern to suggest the speaker’s calm, even bemused, reflection on death.

Voice

The voice in Poem 54 appears split. The voice that shares the opening 10 lines is childlike in its amazement over the intricate order and bustling energy of nature, captured here in what feels like a spring morning. The words are single syllable, reflecting a child’s voice. With wide-eyed innocence, the voice tallies the immediate world with loving care, stunned by the sheer restlessness, the easy “bustling” (Line 8) of nature: the birds that build their nests, the bees which drone hungrily across fields, the mornings that come so faithfully, the noons that follow so regularly. This sense of order is sufficient to give the speaker pause and wonder whether being part of that spacious order is sufficient to allay fears of death.

That voice gives way at Line 11 when the metaphor of the stock exchange and the complex world of the financial marketplace suddenly takes over. The voice of the innocent child amazed by nature gives way to a very adult voice, a bit snarky, who finds poking fun at the careless confusion of the financial world even as it masquerades as order and stability and security. The jargon of the financial market reflects a more adult voice as well. The closing 10 lines then work as irony—both the speaker and whoever might read the poem in 1857, when the country reeled through a catastrophic financial panic, would get the joke.

So which is the voice of the poem: amazement or amusement? The answer is suggested by the formal structure itself: uninterrupted by a stanza break, the poem scans as one smooth and flowing voice. Dickinson was fond of using songbirds as a metaphor for her own peculiar perception. She was intrigued by how birds have eyes where we have ears, thus giving birds a much fuller range of vision. For birds, the world never comes into a single perception; rather, the world becomes worlds, mutually exclusive and yet both valid. Therefore, the voice here is both amazed and amused, simultaneously astounded and ironic, really for Dickinson the only way to engage the contrary, paradoxical world itself.

Related Titles

By Emily Dickinson

Study Guide

A Bird, came down the Walk