If I should die

The poem reflects on life after the speaker’s hypothetical death. In doing so, the poem acknowledges what it perceives as a universal conceit: that many people think their death will be something like the apocalypse, that is, when they die, the world ends. Others must therefore be prepped on how to proceed without their presence. Though this is an everyday occurrence—someone dying and another surviving them—the speaker makes her potential death a grand agenda and therefore preps the “you” of the poem.

At its most personal level, the “you” referenced is most likely a lover, a close confidant, or even a family member. But there are other less immediately clear audiences that the poet may be addressing, an audience wide enough to include, more than a century and a half after its composition, the reader (despite Dickinson’s studied refusal to pursue publication of her poetry). The “you” might even be the speaker addressing her own essence, her very soul, which is a distinct possibility given the Christian doctrines that Dickinson studied so closely to survive the body’s spiral into mortality. In any event, the premise of the poem is how to handle the reality that individual death robs the world only of that individual life.

The speaker reflects on the relationship between the individual and the kinetic world of nature, noting how nature will maintain its rhythms “as it has usual done” (Line 6), despite the speaker’s absence. The birds and the bees, suggesting then as now the fertile procreative energy of nature, will continue unabated, suggesting that unlike people nature survives in a great cycle in which death is only an apparent end. Winter, unlike private and personal death, is only a portal toward restoration and reanimation. The poet uses an if/then construction to convince herself as much as anyone of the inevitably of her own conclusion, one that challenges the egoism of taking comfort in the illusion that her death will be the end of everything: If the natural world goes on without her, then she really should depart the world without anxiety, without clamor, without fear.

The speaker feels humility when facing the boundless rhythms of nature that reveal the wonderful inconsequentiality of the individual. But the poem does not end here with the poet tapping the immemorial comfort of a natural world that will never acknowledge endings given its manifest energy. Rather, the poet turns now to a new metaphor, the bustling world of business, an odd choice as poets have seldom found the floor of the stock exchange conducive to philosophical reflections of mortality.

There appears then to be a kind of mirror-reflection structure, the poet using the furious busyness and the steady rhythms of commerce to suggest, or more specifically to amplify the same sort of perpetual energy of any natural ecosystem. The stock exchange, banks, brokerage houses assert that same kind of cooperative energy, an artificial ecosystem, perhaps, but whose harmonic rhythms will be sustained long after the speaker’s death, in fact guaranteeing prosperity and financial rewards to those who survive the speaker.

This is where Dickinson’s sense of irony comes into play. The supposedly thriving ecosystem of commerce is hardly the same sort of reassuring ecosystem as the woods all around Amherst. Dickinson first drafted Poem 54 in the tense months during which America, up and down the East Coast, reeled in one of the most dramatic collapses in American financial history, the so-called Panic of 1857. The financial panic, in which Dickinson’s own father, a prominent lawyer with a broad portfolio of investments, lost a great deal of money, was driven largely by a widespread loss of confidence in the country’s gold reserves sufficiency in covering its alarmingly increasing national debt. Mercenary stock dealers, unscrupulous land speculators, and greedy bankers preyed on investors’ anxieties and began dealing in what essentially were junk bonds to create the illusion of fiduciary competence. The Panic, in which investors lost thousands (millions adjusted for current value), lasted for close to four years—the nation recovered its financial stability only with the advent of the Civil War.

The point Dickinson makes with such brash and snarky delight is that perhaps our world does not operate all that smoothly and that perhaps finding comfort there is ironic. Unlike the birds and bees, trees and sun, the financial system was prone to vacillations and evident ineptitude, making ironic the calm image the poem closes with: elderly energetic gentlemen conducting business in some “pleasant scene” (Line 18)—one can only imagine the bald panic and ugly chaos among these anything-but gentle-men as their financial institutions and their fortunes one after another faced ruin. Unlike the closing of Line 10, this exclamation mark, which closes the poem, is ironic. Perhaps, quips the speaker with barely restrained bemusement, perhaps that whole going quietly into death and settling serenely and snugly there in the grave by the daisies, maybe that whole idea needs further reflection.