Emily Dickinson My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close Analysis

The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s poem “My life closed twice before its close” reveals the inevitability of death, hints on the idea of immortality in the afterlife, and describes the trauma related to the death of loved ones through the careful crafting of two paradoxes and usage of foreboding diction. The narrator presents the first paradox in the first line and title, “My life closed twice before its close” (Dickinson 1). This paradox exposes the idea that two traumatic events happened in the speaker’s life, but these events are not fully revealed in the first stanza. Later in the stanza, the speaker wonders if a third traumatic event may happen to them “if Immortality unveil” (Dickinson 3). The immortality described serves as a hyperbole to the length of time that the narrator felt passed after the events happened; during

This emphasizes the deeper idea that only time can tell what can happen, but this idea is taken to a darker sense that over time dreadful things will happen. The usage of an assonant rhyme between “see” (Dickinson 2) and “me” (Dickinson 4) asserts the metaphor between immortality and vision. The second stanza begins by emphasizing the tragedy of the events that occur by describing them as “hopeless to conceive” (Dickinson 5). In the final two lines of the poem, Dickinson employs her final paradox, in which she states that “parting is all we know of heaven” (Dickinson 7) and “all we need of hell” (Dickinson 8). This clever paradox reveals the event that the speaker described in the first stanza as a “parting” (Dickinson 7). of a loved or close individual through death. The paradox also has the logical approach that the only way to get to know heaven is through death, but the death of a loved one creates a “hell” (Dickinson 8) for the acquaintance who has not joined the loved one in the