Emily Dickinson's If You Were Coming In The Fall

The poem “If You were Coming in the Fall” is written by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson studied at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female SEminary and wrote 1800 poems. About a dozen of her poems were published during her life. She mentions to her friend that various people in her life have died such as her friends and her teacher. In her poem, “IF you were Coming in the Fall,” she talks about waiting a long time for someone to return and the threat of an unknown length of time. In this poem, the theme is “waiting for a long and indefinite length of time makes people anxious and desperate.” I came to this conclusion because the overall tone of the poem is anxious and desperate. Also, the content always tells of huge amounts of time even when paraphrased. Firstly, the author uses tone to convey the theme in the poem. For example, the author mentions “...Of time’s uncertain wing, it goads me, like the Goblin Bee, that will not state its sting.” This talks about how she doesn’t know when the person she is waiting for will return. This shows her anxiety because the
For instance, all of stanza 3 talks about what she would do if “only centuries delayed.” She talks about waiting centuries, giving the feeling of a daunting amount of time she must wait. She also speaks of counting these centuries on her hand showing the importance of the passage of time in this poem. In addition, the majority of stanza 2, which talks about “winding the months up in balls and putting them in separate drawers” says that time doesn’t matter to her, as she would just “put them away.” Also, in this stanza she uses the word “if,” to show that she doesn’t know exactly how long she must wait for her loved one to return. To conclude, the paraphrasing in stanzas 2 and 3 emphasize the importance of time passing quickly and not mattering but still represents the anxiety of waiting for long and undetermined amounts of