If You Were Coming In The Fall Analysis

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If You Were Coming in the Fall

The poem “If you were coming in the fall” by Emily Dickinson, is about a person waiting for someone they love, but the person they’re waiting for is taking so long it hurts the speaker. Emily attended Mount Holyoke female seminary and throughout her life she seldom left her own home, and rarely had visitors. Her poems were often deeply impacted by her own life. Emily Dickinson’s poem “If you were coming in the fall” was a poem about love, time, and separation, this is easy to tell due to the massive amount of desperation, anxiety, and pain, that seems to seep from the poem itself. The describes how much the speaker hates waiting for their loved one, and how she wishes she could just throw all that wasted time away. The poem hints at this throughout it’s entirety and then some.

One of the ways Emily Dickinson makes the theme known is by the tone/attitude of the speaker. The speaker continuously makes remarks about time itself and how she doesn't appreciate the time she spends alone “if i could see you in a year, I’d wind the months in balls and put them each in separate drawers, until their time befalls” (Dickinson, 2nd stanza) This shows that the speaker is getting desperate for the attention of the person she’s waiting for. With the amount of desperation in the speaker's voice it can be assumed that whoever she’s waiting for is special to her heart. …show more content…

The author uses powerful words and metaphors to convey her message, which leads to the assumption that the itself was based on something Emily Dickinson had experienced in her own life. This poem isn’t hard to relate to, due to time basically being a nuisance to humans almost everyday of their lives. This poem is a perfect example of human nature and how we care for