If This Is Fading - Analysis

Wanting the End Because It Feels Like a Beginning

This poem’s central move is a dare: the speaker imagines that what people fear—fading, dying, sleep—might actually be so beautiful, so intoxicating, that she wants it at once. The repeated conditional If this is doesn’t sound hesitant; it sounds like the mind testing a sensation and then lunging toward it. Each possibility is met not with pleading but with appetite: let me immediately fade! and Bury me are commands, as if the speaker has discovered a bliss and refuses to be talked out of it.

Three Names for One Experience: Fading, Dying, Sleep

The poem keeps renaming the same mystery. If this is fading suggests a gentle dissolving—color thinning, presence softening. Then it sharpens into If this is dying, and the speaker’s request becomes more vivid: such a shroud of red! Red is not the usual color of burial calm; it carries blood, heat, and ceremony. Finally the poem offers If this is sleep, which makes death sound intimate and nightly, something a body already practices. The effect is to collapse the distance between everyday surrender (sleep) and ultimate surrender (death), making the speaker’s eagerness feel both startling and strangely logical.

The Red Shroud: Terror, Triumph, or Desire

That shroud of red is the poem’s most charged detail. A shroud should hide, but red announces. It could be martyr-like splendor, a wish to turn death into spectacle; it could also imply passion, as if the speaker wants to be wrapped in the very intensity that is leaving her. The tension is that burial usually implies silence and concealment, yet she asks for a color that cannot keep quiet. In this poem, death isn’t a dimming; it is a kind of saturation.

A Turn Into Public Speech: Saying Good Evening

Midway through, the voice pivots from private craving to a social farewell: Good Evening, gentle Fellow men! The phrase is oddly courteous, almost like leaving a party early or bidding neighbors goodnight. That politeness changes the tone—less feverish, more composed—and it makes death feel like crossing a threshold rather than being taken. The speaker doesn’t say goodbye; she says Good Evening, a greeting that treats the dark as a companionable arrival.

The Peacock’s Pride and the Poem’s Audacity

The closing line, Peacock presumes to die!, turns the whole meditation into a small burst of bravado. A peacock is the emblem of display; to connect it with dying suggests a death performed with pride, not merely endured. The word presumes carries a double edge: it can mean bold confidence, but also arrogance. The poem lets both meanings stand. The speaker’s readiness to shut the eye on such a night could be spiritual courage—or it could be an almost theatrical overconfidence in her own ability to meet the end beautifully.

A Hard Question the Poem Leaves Hanging

If the speaker is so eager to immediately fade, what is she really responding to: death itself, or the sudden feeling that life has become unbearably vivid at the edge of it? The poem’s most unsettling possibility is that the rapture might be the body’s last flare of color—the very red it asks to be wrapped in—making the peacock’s pride both magnificent and tragically brief.