If You Were Coming In The Fall Figurative Language

In Drawing the Color Line: Race and Real Estate in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago, Margaret Garb shows how Chicago was divided up based on race and social status. She shows the readers what happens upon the black tenants’ arrival to the white-only neighborhoods, and she shows how the white homeowners dealt with it.

“If You Were Coming in the Fall”, is a poem written by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson wrote a a lot about love. Dickinson fell in love with an unknown person when she was in her early twenties. Unfortunately, Edward Dickinson did not approve of Emily's unknown lover. Later on in Dickinson's life, she began to fall in love with a man named Otis Lord. Dickinson and Lord wrote each other constantly. Dickinson refused Lord's marriage proposal, but they continued to write to each other. Emily Dickinson's, “If You Were Coming in the Fall”, portrays a theme of love and time, a tone of distress, and a certain purpose.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

The author uses imagery in the poem to enable the reader to see what the speaker sees. For example, in lines 4-11 the speaker describes to us the

The use of imagery in this poem creates a vivid image of each description that leaves the reader feeling connected to the author in unprecedented way. Even if you’re not a middle aged woman waiting for her daughter to come from from college, you still understand. This is because the author has used

The second stanza of the poem takes a shift. He urges that they are to die soon and that life is too short while death is forever. In lines 27 to 28, the speaker scares her by saying worms will try to take her virginity if she doesn't sleep with him now. As for the third stanza, the speaker is simplifying what is going to happen when she dies, so why not use up her precious time now?

She hears a fly buzzing, an onomatopoeia, and through similes in line three and four she compares stillness in the room to “like the Stillness of the Air—Between Heaves of Storms.” The dynamic between the buzzing fly, hovering around the room signifying her death, and the tension of the room sets up the gravity of her situation. In the second stanza Dickinson uses synecdoche to illustrate the people around her mourning her death. She uses “eyes” and “breaths” as the main subject of the sentence. An interpretation of this is to blur the explicit mention of people and instead focus again on the senses or visual and auditory imagery.

Separation from loved ones can be the hardest thing ever, as depicted time and time again in my life and I’m sure yours. A long-distance relationship illustrated by Emily Dickinson in the poem “If You Were Coming in the Fall” is difficult and she shows that in a few stanzas. She expresses the agony through literary devices, sophisticated diction, and the time change in the last stanza. Love is the cause of the most happiness and most emotional pain in the world, a long-distance relationship can only add to those emotions. Literary devices can make or break a poem and its meaning to the reader, this poem is wonderfully constructed and demonstrates that perfectly.

Have you lost someone close to you in your life? It is difficult to deal with and my group and I read the poem “If You Were Coming in the Fall” be Emily Dickinson. The poem talks about a person talking about waiting for someone. During Dickinson’s life she lost many loved ones like family, close friends and her professor. This fact is relevant to the poem because the poem could be talking about meeting her loved ones again in the not so near future. After reading the poem I believe that the theme to “If You Were Coming in the Fall” by Emily Dickinson, is that when a person loses someone, the waiting will make them desperate to see that person again.

In Dickinson’s poem, “Because I could not stop for Death,” there is much impression in the tone, in symbols, and in the use of imagery that exudes creativity. One might undoubtedly agree to an eerie, haunting, if not frightening, tone in Dickinson’s poem. Dickinson uses controlling adjectives—“slowly” and “passed”—to create a tone that seems rather placid. For example, “We slowly drove—He knew no haste / …We passed the School … / We passed the Setting Sun—,” sets a slow, quiet, calm, and dreamy atmosphere (5, 9, 11,

Two of Dickinson’s universal techniques are metaphor and the fresh application of language; both techniques result in powerful images, and can be seen in two of her poems that focus on nature themes, “ A Bird came down the Walk” and “narrow Fellow.” She closes the poem, “ A Bird” with a stanza equating flight through the air with movement through water,

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense

(14, 18). During this poem, Dickinson wants us to simply see her version of a person's trip during death. The imagery is supposed to lead us into seeing what the author is describing.

Death is the major speaker of this poem, its persona shows how cruel and violent it can be, however she also speaks of getting everything out of life you can before death. Starting with line twenty three of the poem she begins talking about living a full life before death, "When it 's over, I want to say all my life/I was a bride married to amazement/I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." (23-25). Being a bride married to amazement is a comparison to commitment, being with the same person every day. However in this case with a lifestyle instead. Doing amazing and memorable things every possible day you can, not letting life pass you by. This also fits perfectly with the next few lines

This is symbolic of her looking at death as a new beginning as opposed to a sad ending. There is a feeling of disappointment as she thinks that she is going towards eternity but she just ends up viewing the “House that Seemed a Swelling of the Ground” and then centuries later, reflects upon her journey towards and eternity she didn’t witness. To Dickinson death was not something to be afraid of but to rather embrace and accept because it was inevitable, yet as in her life ends up disappointed because death leads to nothingness.