If I should die

Dickinson wrote poetry during a tumultuous era in American cultural history. This era marked the nation’s movement away from a rural economy toward an urban economy—that is, away from nature as a personal and even sacred energy and toward (with some profound doubts and hesitations) an artificial environment of streets and buildings, homes and businesses that depersonalized individuals to the point of making them feel like cogs in a massive construct. Dickinson herself lived in Amherst, a refined and cultured college town just miles from the bustling seaport and financial center of Boston, which was also a short morning’s ride from the open wilderness of the Berkshires.

The poem takes place on that threshold line—the poem, written in the mid-19th century just as America was lurching into urbanization, juxtaposes both systems and finds that the artificial constructs of the city are in the end ironic mock-ups, grossly flawed imitations of the order, logic, and energy of nature.

The opening half of the poem celebrates the simple and reassuring rhythms of nature, a sunshine world that suggests light, fertility, cooperation, and harmony. In observing that rural world (which hints so strongly of the restless energy of springtime), the speaker finds some logic for embracing her place within that system, and thus mitigating her fears over her own death, by suggesting that death within that wonderful system is essentially irrelevant.

The city, however, with its design flaws and its inevitable system failures, offers a far less congenial insight and far less reassurance. Dickinson, however, holds back from using the poem as a simple screed railing against the modern world. The poem is hardly a jeremiad against the soul-oppressive urban environments. Indeed, her stinging criticism of that environment is rendered as a back-handed compliment, suggesting, at a moment when the financial structures were being exposed as deeply flawed, how wonderfully, how briskly, how efficiently those systems operate—banks and investment houses and stock brokerages—all in the experienced hands of happy and knowledgeable gentlemen. In this irony, Dickinson suggests with amusement the systemic failures of these new constructions called cities.