Dickinson 389
The speaker in Dickinson's poem is noticeably outside the main action of the poem. The first line makes that clear: "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House." Dickinson creates a patchwork story that the reader and speaker create through Dickinson's poem, based on outside clues and speculation. In Dickinson's poem, each stanza has a central focus; the focus is an action or an image, each one providing more certainty to the belief that there has been a death. These images and actions lead up to the eventual, haunting realization that there will be a funeral procession. Dickinson also cleverly plays with words, puns, and sound associations. The attitude and emphasis of her poem comes as the poem builds, surprising offering no comfort on the subject of death at the end.In Dickinson's poem, the death seems to have just occurred, perhaps an hour or two-at the very least "As lately as Today." In Dickinson's poem, the actions of the characters appear to be the more immediate concerns of postmortem-airing out the house, discarding the mattress of the deceased, etc.Dickinson's poem is somber. The very list of characters that come and go and "hurry by" the death house is something not
The mortician, or perhaps the coffin-maker, is described as belonging to "the Appalling Trade. "The Minister-goes stiffly in-" is an obvious pun; the term "stiff" is associated with a corpse. The humor in Dickinson's poem, if one could call it humor, is sublime, dry. The final line of the poem does impart a bit of comfort to the poem; "In just a country town" does lend itself to a reading of comfort and familiarity. This is unusual, because most poems on death seek to offer comfort or create some emotion about death. What is consistent in the tone of the poem is the idea of death as a looming figure. " The neighbors are first to arrive, second only to the immediate family, whose members are surely already inside. At this point, the person is finally dead, and those people who were not as close to the person can now join in this "procession" of visitation. The speaker wonders, like the boys, how the death occurred. " Measure is being taken of the inhabitants' demeanors, or of the corpse itself, so that a casket can be crafted. Another moment of play comes when the undertaker's (or coffin-maker's) visit is described as his taking "measure of the house. In the end, Dickinson's poem has a tone that one would expect to feel in a poem about death in the home. Dickinson does not write of mourning, but of the practical tasks that must be done. Still, the overall mood of the poem is consistent-somber and looming. The house itself has a "numb look" to it.
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Acceptance Essays
