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My life closed twice before it’s close






Considerable critical attention has been given to discovering biographical origins for the two closings of life that Dickinson refers to in this poem. However, the absence of a clear date for the composition of the poem makes even more difficult the already thorny problem of positioning the poem within the poet’s life. Scholars have speculated that Dickinson could have in mind the deaths of her father in 1874 and her mother in 1882, provided that the poem was composed after her mother’s death. Other possibilities include the death of Sophia Holland in 1844, the death of Benjamin Newton in 1853, the death of the family friend and publisher Samuel Bowles in 1878, the death of Dickinson’s personal friend the Reverend Charles Wadsworth in 1882, or the death of the family friend and Dickinson suitor Judge Otis Phillips Lord in 1884. To complicate matters even further, Dickinson’s use of abstract language, like “event” and “Parting”, to describe the speaker’s loss opens the possibility that the losses referred to could apply to the ending of friendships, or even the failure of romantic relationships. Fortunately, sure knowledge of biographical origins is not essential to a clear understanding of the poem.

The crucial lines of the poem are the two that end it: “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell”. The point here is that any sense we have of what heaven and hell are like results from our experience on earth. The loss of those we love prompts the hope for reunion in eternity, just as the devastation of life without loved ones becomes the basis for imagining the horrors of hell. There is no dependence on outside authority, such as clergy or the Bible, for information about eternity. As in “Because I could not stop for Death–”, we confront a speaker who presents death as an experience that stands apart from explanations provided by social institutions. The radically individualistic orientation of the speaker is introduced in the first stanza, where the speaker states, “It yet remains to see / If Immortality unveil / A third event to me”. Clearly, this is a speaker who takes nothing for granted.

Yet another approach to the poem views the two closures of life as relating to changes that have taken place entirely within the speaker’s interior life and not involving other people. As in the poem “Finding is the first Act”, this speaker could be referring to stages in her own growth process when innocence was lost and dreams diminished so that what is mourned is the loss of a simpler, happier self. In this context the two losses could correspond to the transition from childhood’s sense of infinite possibility, to the adolescent’s trust in social identity, which is then displaced by the adult’s distrust of social authority. Such a process would be consistent with the idealization of childhood and the condemnation of social institutions so central to romanticism.

 

 






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