35 pages • 1 hour read
Emily DickinsonIf you were coming in the fall
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Metaphor and Simile
The poem opens with a simile comparing how the speaker will brush aside summer as a housewife brushes away a fly. The contrast between the enormity of summer and the insignificance of a fly adds immediate weight, intrigue, and complexity to the poem, and it hooks the reader with the imaginative, tangible, and imagistic comparison.
Dickinson also uses metaphor when the speaker imagines months as a yarn-like substance that can be mound into balls and the uncertainty of time to the goblin bee. These metaphors work well because she is taking a non-tangible thing like time and using physical images to help the reader feel this unknowable thing. By utilizing concrete metaphors to paint a picture for the reader, Dickinson communicates intangible feelings with physical sensation. This adds relatability to her thoughts, making her emotions much easier to feel and understand than if she simply spoke about them literally.
Repetition
One subtle use of repetition in this poem is at the beginning of each stanza. Dickinson repeats the word “If” at the beginning of every stanza until the last one. While not an immediately obvious detail, once the final stanza comes in, this repetition adds another dimension of doubt to the poem. Even though the speaker does not fully acknowledge their lover may never return until the end of the poem, the use of the hypothetical construction “if” in the previous stanzas suggests that, at least subconsciously, they always knew this situation might not end in the lover returning. It is not until the last stanza when they express a certainty by using “but” and showing how now they are uncertain of how long the love will be gone that they feel uneasy. The break in repetition at the end adds another layer of tragedy to this realist perspective.
Form and Meter
This poem is written in ballad stanzas with an ABCB rhyme scheme and alternating lines of iambic tetrameter, lines of four metrical feet with each foot being one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, and iambic trimeter, lines of three feet of the same pattern as the iambic tetrameter. Each stanza can be scanned to see this rhythm. Here is scansion of the last stanza:
But, now, / uncert / ain of / the length
Of this, / that is / between,
It goads / me, like / the Gob / lin Bee---
That will / not state— / its sting.
Readers might also notice the unusual capitalization and use of dashes throughout the text. This is characteristic of Dickinson, as she often uses different kinds of dashes and other hand-drawn marks to indicate different kinds of pauses for rhythmic or rhetorical effect. One place where the effect is strong is in the last line, Line 20, where Dickinson uses a dash between “state” and “its sting.” This extra space and pause amplifies the feeling of anticipation and waiting the speaker expresses when they talk about the bee that will not announce its sting. It simply hovers around the speaker, drawing out the inevitable. In a little way, Dickinson mimics this feeling with the dash.
Finally, not all of Dickinson’s end rhymes are perfect. While a rhyme like “by” (Line 2) and “Fly” (Line 4) in the first stanza is a perfect masculine rhyme (a rhyme of the last or only syllable in this case), she also rhymes “balls” (Line 6) with “fuse” (Line 8) in the second stanza. This rhyme is more consonance—repetition of consonant sound at the end or beginning of a word—and a slant rhyme—a rhyme that sounds similar bit isn't the same—than a full rhyme. Later, Dickinson also rhymes “be/Eternity,” which combines two words with very different syllabic counts. Again, this is an unusual choice. However, Dickinson used these kinds of rhymes often in her poetry, and it has become a stylistic quirk associated with her.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
