Liz Foster’s April 1st Work

There’s one poem that really stuck out to me when doing the reading for today, and that’s 487.  A long shadow – death – is on a lawn, indicating that the sun is about to go down. To paraphrase (sorry!!), death is therefore casting its long shadow over the lawn of our lives. The looming specter of death seems to play a role in so many of Dickinson’s poems, whether as a comforting notion, an incentive to action, or simply an affecting presence to keep in mind when considering other things. 

In 487, the mood of the poem is tense. Death seems much closer at hand than in poem 522. The poem itself is one long sentence, cut up with line breaks (a lot of line breaks). It’s choppy and terse, very to-the-point. The line “Indicative that Suns go down – “ distances the reader from the moment at first; it is not “the” sun that is going down, Suns just “go down” in general. Nothing to worry about, just something to keep in mind. In the second stanza, however, the grass “is” startled at the sun going down, and darkness “is” about to pass. Very suddenly, the shadow is no longer hypothetical but real. It’s about to fall over the grass – over the reader’s life. So the poem starts out with death as a looming presence, closing in, and then suddenly the reader must face it directly.

In poem 522, however, death is pushing life forward, but more as a hypothetical. If “life’s little duties….were infinite,” then it would seem that there’s infinite time to accomplish them (at least in the first stanza). In the second stanza, however, “…existence – some way back – / stopped – struck – my ticking through – “ There’s so much to do, but the ticking has either stopped entirely (the narrator is dead) or the narrator has realized time really isn’t infinite. “Life’s labor” is done to “…hold our senses on.” It’s therefore done to hold off realizations about the truth – “to cover what we are”. So, in this poem, death is a presence but it’s a softer presence, pushing forward ideas about life. In 487, it’s more of a philosophical statement and then a stark realization. And there are so many other poems that use the theme of death to similar ends. It’s usually pushing life forward, or making us (Dickinson) reevaluate how we are living while we’re still here.