Emily Dickinson Poem 712
...za relates to the theme of the spirit world also, but in a different way. This stanza states “I had put away / My labor and my leisure too. / For His Civility”. (6-8) Through these lines one can tell that the speaker is now finding out that she is actually deceased. She has been dead, she thinks only for a little while, viewing the world through the eyes of a person now in the afterlife. These examples clearly express Dickinson’s love of writing about the spirit world. The third and fourth stanzas of the poem introduce the element of everyday life by creating a metaphor for the cycle of life. As the speaker describes her journey, she passes through three seasons of the year. Just as seasons change, she realizes that life also goes through a set of unalterable changes: spring, autumn and winter. At first she passes spring, a time of new life and innocence “where Children str[i]ve” (9). Next she passes autumn where she sees “the Fields of Gazing Grain” (11). Autumn represents middle-age, where most people, like the grain, are waiting to be cut down. Lastly, in stanza four, she enters the night of winter. Winter can be represented as old-age when one is getting ready to die. Dickinson expresses her theme of everyday life throughout these two stanzas, at first creating a light-hearted, jovial atmosphere of childhood and progressing into the gloomy topic of death. For the first time, the speaker sees her grave in stanza five. She does not describe it as a tombstone though but as “a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground” (17-18). The speaker seems very comfortable with the fact that this house is in fact her grave as she does not seem frightened by the idea. In this stanza, Dickinson carefully weaves an element of the spirit world and everyday life into one by connecting the grave with the speakers house. In the last stanza, the speaker finds out that she has not been dead for a short amount of time, but that she has been dead for centuries. Her carriage ride happened centuries ago “and yet / Feels shorter than the Day” (21-22). Time seems to have went by so slow because the speaker is heading “toward Eternity” (24). Life is moving all around the ...