35 pages • 1 hour read
Emily DickinsonA 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.
“If you were coming in the Fall” plays with the poetic cliché of eternal love. In most stories, love is often placed on a pedestal and treated like something that conquers all things. This romantic vision of love is common in books, plays, poems, and movies, and this idea has even bled into culture where many people believe in the power of love to last through all trials and tribulations. Poems like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” (1849) express this concept of a love that is so strong it even transcends death, a concept Dickinson also uses in this poem. However, where Dickinson differs from other works that explore this concept is she questions love's ability to transcend the heartbreak and despair of time. As the speaker ponders on the time they will wait for their love, they almost talk themself out of fantasy and into a realistic understanding of just how long time can be. They realize that while love is strong, waiting is excruciating and may be stronger than the love they have for their lover.
This inversion does not necessarily discredit eternal love, but it frames it in a more realistic way that acknowledges the difficult nature of life.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson