preview

To Better Understand The Poem “If You Were Coming In The

Decent Essays
To better understand the poem “If you were coming in the fall” it is helpful to know more about the poet herself, Emily Dickinson. She was born on December 10, 1830 and attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for one year. Dickinson rarely left her home, so when she did the people she would meet greatly impacted her. In many poems she discussed love. There are three men who her poems are most likely about. Charles Wadworth, Otis P. Lord, and Samuel Bowles were all men she had relations with and was very fond of them.

By the mid 1860s, Dickinson was living in isolation with her father, brother, and sister. To her, they were not just family but intellectual companions. Much of Dickinson’s work was influenced by metaphysical poets and also
…show more content…
To her, Summer will pass with half a smile, because she will see her lover soon, and half a spurn because she must wait all summer before seeing her lover. She uses summer because most people see summer as something fun, but for Dickinson, she cannot truly enjoy summer without her lover.

In the second stanza, Dickinson says that is she had to wait a year to see her lover she would wind the months in balls and put them all in separate drawers. She plans to do this to make the illusion that time is going by faster. She also does this to emphasis that each months is its own challenge. After each month passes, she will just have another drawer to open and another month to overcome. It is also interesting to note that after Dickinson 's death, many of her poems were found at the crumbled at back of her clothes drawers. This just shows that this poems was written to express the true, raw emotions Dickinson was feeling at the time.

In the third stanza there is a notable shift of optimism. The two earlier stanzas depict waiting for a season or a year. However, in the third stanza it discusses waiting for centuries. It would be easier to talk about it in terms of decades because a lifetime in decades can be counted on two hands. In her poem she exaggerates this time period being a century. Not knowing when she will see her lover again and waiting for him to come back makes the decades feel like centuries to Dickinson. She
Get Access