If you were coming in the fall

“If you were coming in the Fall” is a poem that sets up a feeling and then undermines it, similar to how a sonnet uses a volta, or turn, to illustrate the complexity and contradictory nature of things. In this case, the feeling the poem undermines is longing. The first four stanzas establish the speaker’s longing for their lover, and through these metaphors, Dickinson romanticizes the image of the waiting lover, making it seem like love is strong enough to conquer all things including time. This follows the cliché image of the woman who waits for her lover to return to her (usually from war or from the seas). However, as the poem progresses, Dickinson injects doubt. As the speaker explores the fantasy of their love conquering time, reality slowly creeps in until, at the end of the poem, it takes over the fantasy they started with, leaving them in a perpetual state of heartache.

In a way, the progression of this shift from fantasy to reality plays on the romantic nature of love poetry. Dickinson does this by using an escalating scale of time, starting with small chunks and lengthening the time with each stanza. Each stanza change also introduces a different realistic thought to contrast the romantic imagery.

In Stanza 1, there is no doubt at all. The speaker can easily swat away the seasons. The time is annoying, but it is nothing more than a slight disturbance, and with the wave of a hand, they can endure until their lover returns. Dickinson chooses summer and fall here to illustrate the strength of the speaker's love. If the summer is the time of year of life and vigor, then the fall is when the cold begins to come as the year nears its end. If a reader takes these seasons to represent the speaker’s life, then they are saying they will readily skip through the summer of their life—the time of youth and energy—just to have their lover return. They are willing to sacrifice the most fruitful time of their life for this person.

However, in Stanza 2, the romanticism of such a notion is undermined by a short insertion of reality. Here, they apply a logical defense mechanism to fight the pain of longing and waiting. Whereas in the first stanza the time was nothing to be concerned with, here they must employ a system to categorize the units of time. Doing this gives them a feeling of order and control over the time. They can place the individual balls in their own drawers and count them as they please. While they are not ready to admit that the waiting is painful, they are working out a system for enduring what is clearly eating away at them.

The third stanza again attempts to put on a brave face instead of admitting to the reality of the situation, but here the speaker’s romantic vision begins to crumble. They start with the romantic declaration that even centuries are nothing to them, as they will count them on their hand like a child counts on their fingers. However, the last two lines express a feeling of isolation and disintegration. As they count, their fingers crumble from their hand, showing how with time, they lose pieces of themself. That these pieces fall away into a far-off land that they have never and will never see shows their feelings of helplessness and distress. To Dickinson, Van Diemen’s Land would have represented an almost made up wasteland—almost like a modern day reader might imagine Mars or a planet in another galaxy. The reality of this situation is starting to get to the speaker.

Their desperation becomes even more extreme in the next stanza. Here, they wonder if death is the answer to their longing. They try to come across as strong, saying they would easily throw away life the same way they swatted at the fly earlier. Life will be like a piece of trash that has no use if there is the possibility that in death they can be with their lover. Again, this is a romantic notion and alludes to stories like Romeo and Juliet where two young people, consumed by romance, cannot live without one another. However, because this poem has slowly infused reality into this childish fantasy, the stanza comes across as alarming and feels more like a copout than an actual solution to the speaker's problems. While they don't mention suicide, they certainly allude to it, and in the context of the next stanza, this reads more like a desperate response to the situation than an actual realistic proposition.

The final stanza is the first place they fully admit to the reality of their feelings. As they have contemplated the time they must wait, they have come to the realization that they do not know how long it will actually be, if the time will actually ever end, or if they can actually bear it. They return to the metaphor in the first stanza of the fly, but now time has shifted into a bee, which is a much more dangerous and upsetting bug. Whereas they could have easily swatted the fly away at the beginning of the poem, now they are constantly stalked by the goblin bee that could sting them at any moment, stealing the hope and love they have. The full weight of their situation has finally dawned on them, and their romantic notions about time and love have been replaced by the cold sting of reality.