If I should die

Emily Dickinson’s Poem 54 received the title “If I Should Die” by an editor long after Dickinson’s death in 1886. The title bears the side effects of Dickinson's reputation: She's often viewed as a self-isolating woman with morbid thoughts always mulling over death, most often her own, thoughts she placed in verse—she talks here, for instance, about her grave decorated with daisies and even speculates on how attractive death could be if perceived at the right angle.

What upends the popular caricature of Dickinson is that the poem’s inception and composition dates to the mid-1850s, when Dickinson was only in her twenties, nearly four decades removed from her own death. That reality helps reimagine the poem. Poem 54 becomes less elegiac and ghoulish and “trademark” Dickinson; it becomes playful, a happy dismissal of the constant press of death as a justification to disparage the joys of life’s routines, routines that are exquisite exactly because they do not last.

Poet Biography

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, then as now a quiet college town, her father a successful lawyer and a trustee at Amherst College. Dickinson, early on while attending Amherst Academy, a kind of fashionable prep school, proved a voracious and unconventional reader, fascinated as much by Christian theological writings dating back centuries as by the cutting-edge theoretical work in the new sciences; as much by the metaphysical poets of the English Renaissance as by the provocative essays of the new school of America’s self-described Transcendentalists, most notably the controversial inspirational essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived in nearby Concord.

In 1847, Dickinson briefly attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College, some 15 miles from Amherst, before returning home. Unmarried, Dickinson, by nature shy, adopted a quiet lifestyle, seldom venturing from her family’s home, although maintaining vigorous correspondence with close friends and with her younger brother and sister while helping to maintain her father’s hectic social schedule. Save for a brief, unsettling brush with financial ruin during the Panic of 1857, during which time she composed Poem 54, and then 20 years later when her father, a powerful presence in her emotional life, died, Dickinson maintained an understated routine in Amherst.

By her mid-twenties, Dickinson began to compose original verse. Fascinated by the process through which the intellect shapes emotional experiences using the vehicle of metaphors, Dickinson worked diligently to craft poetic lines radically different from the often “gaudy” and very public poetry of her era. She distilled poetic lines to minimalist expression, altered the grammatical use of words, created an individual style of punctuation and capitalization, and upcycled the gentle rhythms of the Protestant hymns she grew up listening to. Her poetry often reflects her intensely private life. Indeed, she pioneered what would become more than a generation after her death a major school of American poetry, introspective Confessionalist poetry. Her poems, so individual in their thematic investigations into the dynamics of love and loss and into the provocative reality of death and the difficult struggle for purpose, and so radical in their formal structuring, seldom found an interested publisher.

For decades, Dickinson relied on sharing her poems with a few close friends, whose opinions she valued, and otherwise carefully organizing her poems (never titled, seldom dated) into bundles bound with ribbon and kept in boxes beneath her bed in her Amherst home. Her poems totaled more than 1,700 by the time of her death. What few poems she sent out for publication were altered at the hands of intrusive editors too quick to try to make her eccentric poems more conventional, less startling.

Upon Dickinson’s death in 1886, at the age of 55, her family discovered the archive of her poetry and began to publish her verse to ever-increasing critical plaudits. A complete volume of her poems, however, would not appear until nearly 75 years after her death. Her gravesite in Amherst’s West Cemetery—a simple white headstone inscribed “Emily Dickinson Called Back”—has become a pilgrim site for generations of visitors, attesting to Dickinson’s iconic place in America’s literary pantheon.

Poem Text

If I should die,  

And you should live, 

And time should gurgle on,

And morn should beam,  

And noon should burn, 

As it has usual done;  

If birds should build as early,

And bees as bustling go,— 

One might depart at option  

From enterprise below!  

’T is sweet to know that stocks will stand 

When we with daisies lie, 

That commerce will continue, 

And trades as briskly fly.  

It makes the parting tranquil  

And keeps the soul serene,  

That gentlemen so sprightly  

Conduct the pleasing scene!

Dickinson, Emily. “If I Should Die (54).” Mid-1850s. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem opens with an observation about the speaker dying while an unidentified “you” lives on. The speaker continues to set up the premise of the poem by conjecturing in a string of observations all threaded by “and,” conjectures that collectively create a picture of the natural world going on about its business after the speaker’s death. Time will “gurgle” on (Line 3); suns and noon will continue as they always have done. Bees will continue to buzz about; birds will continue to build their nests. If the natural world continues its course even after the speaker’s death, then such continuity, the speaker concludes, should provide comfort. This comfort might reasonably allow one to “depart at option / From enterprise below” (Lines 9-10), suggesting that the world's steadfast structure even after the speaker's death is a consolation, one that might allow a person to depart happily as opposed to apprehensively, to embrace burial, what the speaker calls the “enterprise below” (Line 10).

At this point, the poem changes its metaphor from the world of nature to the world of people. The speaker again places death within a grand, even sublime context. This time, however, the speaker doesn’t use nature’s unbounded energy but rather the world of high finance. Even as the dead “with daisies lie” (Line 12), the speaker observes, the stocks are “still” (Line 11). In other words, business will “continue” (Line 13) and trade will “briskly fly” (Line 14), despite death.

In the closing lines, the speaker offers a final inspirational thought: the speaker will die peacefully knowing that, above their grave, in the markets of commerce, “gentlemen so sprightly” (Line 17) will go on about their business, “conducting themselves” (Line 18) diligently, forever animating the pleasant scenes typical of the world of high finance: banks, for instance, or retail shops, or the ultimate shop of shops: the stock exchange. If the speaker dies, they will die serenely just knowing in the financial markets of the city, there will always be the “pleasing scene” (Line 18) of energetic gentlemen conducting business in reassuring perpetuity.