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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem’s opening question—what if I die before you do?—sets up Poem 54 as an exploration of the anxiety in a species gifted/cursed with the awareness of its own death. Humans possess a too-fallible, too-vulnerable body that is nevertheless freighted with an intellect aware of its failures and its temporariness, as well as, for many, a soul designed by a Creator to survive the body’s death. In this, humans are a most complicated and contradictory creature far more able to raise the poem’s opening question than to answer it.
The poem, then, is a search for a strategy to calm that anxiety. The poet rejects the logic of pretending death is not real—rather, the poet searches the natural world and then the social constructs people have created to find some way to accept the inevitability of death without tears or fears. Nature, with its bustling energy, offers the poet the reassurance that any individual element of nature once gone cannot diminish the larger energy field. Therefore, one person’s death does not matter because nature continues unabated.
In turn, the poet uses the bustling world of urban commerce to suggest that humanity itself has created faux-ecosystems. These ecosystems, like nature, are self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson
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