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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.
Background
Literary Context: Ballad Lyrical Poetry and Romanticism
“If you were coming in the Fall” is a lyrical ballad, similar to most of Dickinson’s poetry. Lyric poetry is a broad category, but this poem has many lyric qualities. It contains a single speaker who records an emotional personal narrative, the poem is short and written in form, and the poem is songlike in its rhythm and rhyme. In this sense, the poem follows the English Romantic tradition popularized by poets, such as William Wordsworth and John Keats.
The poem is also written in ballad stanzas with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The first and third lines use iambic tetrameter, four metrical feet comprised of one unstressed then one stressed syllable, while the second and fourth lines use iambic trimeter, a line of three metrical feet with the unstressed then stressed pattern. This alternating between metrical feet gives the lines a musical quality while the iambs give them a sing-song feeling.
While Dickinson certainly wrote during the Romantic era in America and was inspired by the Romantics, most critics don’t classify her as a Romantic poet. This poem is a good example of how she both uses Romantic notions and undermines them. While the poem uses common imagery and language, focuses on personal and emotional topics, and references feelings of melancholy and the exotic, all these things are cut down by the infusion of Realism. The speaker wakes up from their fantasy as reality confronts them, destroying their romantic belief in eternal love. The poem is a microcosm of Dickinson’s relationship with Romanticism and Realism.
Authorial Context: Dickinson’s Love Life
This poem, like all of Dickinson’s love poetry, does not name the object of the speaker’s desires. While scholars have debated the identity of the subject of this and other love poems by Dickinson, no one will ever really know for sure if these poems represent Dickinson’s true feelings for a person or if they are the product of an invented persona.
Dickinson’s love life is shrouded in mystery. While she did correspond with a number of people and while some of these correspondences included romantic language, there is no evidence that she was actually romantically or sexually involved with anyone.
Typically, the two most studied aspects of her love life deal with her “Master Letters” and with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert. The “Master Letters” are a series of drafted letters addressed to an unnamed master and found after her death. These letters express devotion and passion, but no one knows if she ever actually sent finalized drafts.
There is a little more evidence about her relationship with her brother’s wife Susan Gilbert. The two exchanged many letters for years, and some of the letters express intense desire and love; however, scholars note that these kinds of intense relationships between women were common in the 1800s, so this is no proof of a romantic or sexual relationship.
It is unlikely any hard facts about Dickinson’s love life will ever come to light; regardless, her poetry does not lose any impact or value from not knowing its backstory.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
