Emily Dickinson's “If you were coming in  the Fall”

If you were coming in the Fall,
I'd brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls—
And put them each in separate Drawers,
For fear the numbers fuse—

If only Centuries delayed,
I'd count them on my Hand,
Subtracting, till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s Land.            [Tasmania, regarded as very remote]

If certain, when this life was out—
That yours and mine, should be
I'd toss it yonder, like a Rind,
And take Eternity—

But, now, all uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee—
That will not state—its sting.

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10463 [Little Brown and Company]

The poem is perhaps addressed to Rev. Charles Wadsworth, a friend who moved from Amherst, Massachusetts to San Francisco.

   Emily Dickinson is the American Shakespeare, IMHO. We don’t know whether this poem was written to Rev. Wentworth, whom Dickinson saw a few times, or someone else, or is a product of her incredible imagination. Well, it is the latter in any case. It is an amazing poem, full of high-energy metaphors.

   Miss Dickinson starts out prosaically enough, “If you were coming in the fall, / I’d . . .” but that’s about as long as Dickinson can be prosaic. “Brush” is an energetic metaphor in the context of brushing away summer, not something most of us can do. Then she uses the simile comparing the summer to a fly—just something to get out of the way, quickly and easily.

   In the second stanza, she gives us an even more energetic metaphor, “winding” the months in balls like lengths of yarn. And just in case you glide over that metaphoric image, she brings you back to it by telling you she would store those “balls” of time in her dresser drawer. Why does she do that? Because she knows that months are calendarized by being stored as collections of numbers in boxes. If the dates escaped their cells they would fuse and could no longer be measured off and made to go away. , Einstein would probably have enjoyed this poem.  She wants the months to go away without putting up resistance. At least that’s my interpretation. What’s yours?

   The metaphor in the third stanza is not as wild. It just amounts to her exaggerating how long she could go on counting centuries on her fingers. She wouldn’t have to count off many centuries before her fingers would be skeletal hands and the separate bones would drop off into Nowheresville. She is continuing her concern with counting away the time between the present and the day he might return to her. She can be patient, just so long as whatever length of time it is it will bring him back to her.

The fourth stanza backtracks from the centuries being counted off in the preceding stanza. Now, instead of counting off the time, she tells him she would give up her life if . . . What? The grammar gets distorted. Dickinson loves to compress her meanings. Why waste energy spelling out things the reader can supply? The second line clearly implies that she would throw away her life if he and she would be united after this life, in Eternity. The powerful metaphor here is conceiving of her life as a rind that she would dispose of like the remains of a cantaloupe—IF she knew that his life and her life would be . . .  Fill it in. Remember from “Grammatical Distortion”?

   In that last stanza, she reverts in the first two lines to a prose statement, albeit a compressed one. She is uncertain when she will see him again. And that uncertainty “goads” her, in other words, allows her no respite. Sleepless in Amherst!  Then she gives us a final metaphor. The uncertainty is like that you feel when a bee lands on your arm. The bee has not yet stung you but you know it's about to, even before you can brush it away. The harmless housefly of the first stanza has morphed. “State its sting” is also an imaginative way of perceiving what a bee does when it stings you. The bee’s statement, when it comes, removes the painful uncertainty but leaves another kind of pain, the implication being that she knows their lives will never be one.