If I should die

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1891

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Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“Song of Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1859)

Here is Emerson’s fullest articulation of the Transcendentalist vision of humanity’s oneness with a glorious and powerful natural world that Dickinson celebrates in the opening 10 lines. Nature, whose “oldest force is good as new” (Line 82), Emerson says, reassures him, who like Dickinson struggles with the awareness of death, that nature does not know exhaustion. To borrow from the poem, a thousand sunrises are as one, apples never cease ripening, and rivers never empty. Within that grand energy field, death is irrelevant. “In slumber,” the speaker ultimately concludes, “I am strong” (Line 8).

“It’s Easy to Invent a Life” by Emily Dickinson (year of composition uncertain)

The poem offers one of Dickinson’s most compelling statements about the ephemeral nature of life, how easy lives come and go, how simply we invent purpose and then find that entire enterprise rendered ironic by the inevitability of death. Within God’s grand scheme, individual people can be easily inserted and just as easily slipped out. As with Poem 54, the irony gives the honesty a certain kind of playfulness, a sly sense of humor. Much as the speaker uses the stock market in Poem 54, here God’s creation itself happily suggests the fragility of human endeavor and the irrelevancy of any single life.

“When I Am Dead” by Christina Rossetti (1894)

Rossetti, a contemporary of Dickinson whose poetry is often aligned with Dickinson’s, here expresses a far more sobering vision of life’s inconsequentiality that counters Dickinson’s more playful sensibility. In addressing those who pass by her grave and in turn dismissing the importance of being remembered and casually accepting the reality of death’s absoluteness, Rossetti despairs of life’s larger purpose and sees in the emptiness of death—which Dickinson finds amusingly ironic and in the end comic—a lurking confirmation of an existential endgame. Death renders life itself meaningless. In Poem 54, Dickinson takes that existential endgame as a given (using the metaphor of the stock market) but hints the viability of awareness, the gift of the Now, as immortality-enough.

Further Literary Resources

“The Relationship of Love and Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson” by Mary Louise Hall (1970)

A seminal investigation that, despite its length (300+ pages), provides a thorough examination of how Dickinson’s sensibility about death drew from and rejected the Transcendentalism of both Emerson and Whitman. The study explores how Dickinson could never find her way to affirmation. Rather, her perception of death existed suspended not in the easy either/or but rather in the both-at-the-same-time. Thus, death is both feared and desired, an attitude reflected in the wry humor of Poem 54 by a very young Dickinson.

“The Knowledge of Death: Emily Dickinson’s ‘Republic of Suffering’” by Daniel Manheim (2013)

This is a historical study of Dickinson and how her perception of death changed radically after the national trauma of the Civil War. Using Whitman as a kind of template, the article traces Dickinson’s often playful explorations of death (among them Poem 54) before the war and the far more sobering, indeed existential meditations after the war when, as with Whitman, death had been a massive national experience, too real to be upcycled into a symbol, too immediate to be mediated by religion, and too bloody to be transcended.

“The Poetics of Emily Dickinson” by Eleanor Wilner (1971)

The article uses Dickinson’s biography—her close relationship to her father, her life of elective seclusion, her growing sense of her own home as a kind of soft prison—and applies that same tension to her perception of death. From a young age, really her twenties as Poem 54 reveals, Dickinson was never shy about exploring the reality of death, not exactly wanting to die but fascinated by the awareness of it. Wilner calls it Dickinson’s “will-to-closure.” Death, as Dickinson perceived it, was like a gate to something unknown, a boundary to be both feared and desired, anticipated and resisted.

Listen to Poem

Recording of “If I Should Die” on Poem Hunter

There are surprisingly few recordings of this early Dickinson poem. Many of the recitations of Poem 54 available on YouTube are read by male voices that neglect the careful balance between delicacy and vulnerability on the one hand and the wry, snarky irony on the other, traits found (or expected) in the speaker of Poem 54’s voice. The video feed provided by Poem Hunter is best of the male-voiced readings in that it carefully follows Dickinson’s line breaks and provides just the right pause at the exclamation point in Line 10. The irony of the second half is tough to capture as the poem says one thing but Dickinson intends another. The second half of the poem is relayed in a far more hushed kind of pace, gently enjoying all the rolling long vowels and the long, lazy l’s as Dickinson captures the chaos of the stock market.

Related Titles

By Emily Dickinson

Study Guide

A Bird, came down the Walk