If I should die

Dickinson published only seven of her more than 1,700 poems during her lifetime, so providing any one of her poems with an appropriate (and accurate) historical context is challenging. In filing her unpublished poems, Dickinson tended to bunch them by category—poems about nature, poems about love, poems about death—rather than in any chronological ordering. As her poems began to find their way to publication long after her death in 1886, it became something of a parlor game to try to find some keys in the poems themselves to when they might have been written.

That endeavor underscores the special nature of the historical context of Dickinson’s poems in that they almost entirely lack the reassuring anchorage in the era of their composition. Poem 54, however, is the exception that proves the rule, the exception because the poem’s second half evidences Dickinson’s familiarity with a very real historic event, and as such Poem 54 represents a unicorn in the Dickinson oeuvre, a poem directly generated by its historic context.

Dickinson composed Poem 54 in late 1857, the year the financial markets along the East Coast were shaken by a catastrophic panic over how the nation’s gold supply suddenly could not cover the country’s steadily mounting debts. America was continuing a relentless and forward-moving program of economic expansion that included pushing land development far west of the Appalachians, constructing miles and miles of railroad tracks through forbidding and often uncharted Western wastelands, pursuing tantalizing new global markets through the development of naval commerce, and enhancing the infrastructure of a handful of urban financial centers as the country edged away from a rural economy.

The poem reflects, albeit ironically, the alarming reality of her nation in the process of coming to terms with a deeply flawed financial infrastructure. Dickinson, in developing her own metaphor for how to come to terms with the inevitability of death, uses the public’s unexamined confidence in its financial systems to assert, playfully and ironically, that perhaps embracing death may not be the smartest response. Perhaps, in turn, the poet uses the Panic mentality to argue all we have really is the embrace of an urgent, incandescent, and entirely unreliable Now. Here, Dickinson, the template of what would become the Confessional poets, uses her historic context as an expression of her identity, her experience, her anxieties, and in the end that same turbulent historical context opens the way for the poet’s celebratory strategy of how to live knowing death is inevitable.