The work under consideration is the poem by Emily Dickinson titled “If I should die”. This work was composed in the middle of the 19th century, and the main features it presents are as follows. The persona of the poem is the narrator, who can be the author herself or some other imaginable human being, who thinks aloud about what it would be like if she or he had to die. The voice of the narrator seems calm and expressing readiness to follow destiny if necessary. Thus, it can be stated that the persona of the poem is a confident and peaceful person which is aware of the fact that other people will live and the world will still exist after his or her death:
The use of figurative language in the poem is another typical feature of the works by Emily Dickinson. Her metaphors, metonymies, epithets, and comparisons add to the picturesqueness of the poem and brighten the sad relations of death and immortality of human beings. Speaking about nature, the author compares it to the abstract notions of time and life-creating her metaphors like this:
From these lines, also the peaceful character of the poem can be observed, which tells all its readers that they should not fear the inevitable, but rather be ready for fate, because “noon should burn” even after the death of the poem’s hero.
As for the meaning of the poem under consideration, it can be stated that the author wanted to show the peace that she had obtained in her attitude towards death and immortality. The inevitability of the former and the unnecessary character of the latter are the central points of this poem. The author also describes the process of parting which is rather painful when a person has a lot of people who would cry over him or her. This makes the person which is to go feel sad, but if he or she knows that their close people will keep living and remembering them, they can go to that “enterprise below” (Dickinson, 10) Thus, the main meaning of the poem under consideration is the person’s readiness to go to the better world and feel no pain about it.
Finally, the poetic form of the work under analysis is rather clear which is also typical of the writings by Emily Dickinson. Her wish to render the full range of emotions with the help of the beautiful wording results in a marvelous combination of rhymes and images in her poems. As for the formal structure of the poem, every third line of it rhymes while the preceding two can either rhyme or not:
The second verse brings the rhyming of the second lines, and the following two verses keep to that pattern as well:
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems. New York: Bartleby.Com, 2000.