If You Were Coming In The Fall - Analysis

The poem’s wager: waiting is bearable only when time is knowable

This poem makes a stark claim by trying to disprove it: the speaker can endure almost any length of separation if she is given certainty, but uncertainty turns time into torment. Each stanza begins as a calm bargain with the future, a set of increasingly extravagant deals: fall, a year, centuries, even after death. The voice sounds practical, almost brisk, as if the right mental trick could domesticate waiting. Yet the final turn admits that no trick works when the duration is unknown; time becomes not a measured span but a creature with a hidden weapon, time’s uncertain wing.

Brushing away summer: domestic patience with an edge

The opening image is deceptively homely: I’d brush the summer by the way housewives brush away a fly. The comparison shrinks a whole season into a minor nuisance that can be swept aside. But Dickinson gives the gesture a strange emotional split: half a smile and half a spurn. That phrase captures the poem’s central tension early: the speaker wants to be gracious toward time, but she also resents being forced to wait at all. The domestic detail doesn’t merely make the scene quaint; it shows a mind trying to treat longing like housekeeping—manageable, repeatable, something you can do with your hands.

Making time into objects: months wound into balls, locked in drawers

In the second stanza the scale stretches from a season to a year, and the coping strategy becomes more elaborate. The speaker would wind the months in balls and store them in separate drawers. Time turns into yarn, then into neatly arranged property. The fantasy is not just about passing time but about possessing it—if she can package the months, she can stop them from spilling everywhere. The phrase Until their time befalls sounds almost legal, as if each month has an appointment it must keep. What she wants is the opposite of suspense: a schedule.

Centuries and Van Diemen’s land: the mind pushed toward exile

When the delay becomes centuries, the poem’s cheerful control starts to fray. Counting centuries on my hand is an absurdly small gesture against an enormous scale, and Dickinson sharpens that absurdity with the violent image of subtraction: Subtracting till my fingers dropped. The body becomes the counting tool, and then the tool breaks. The destination of the dropped fingers—Van Diemen’s land—adds a chill. Even if a reader doesn’t know its history as a penal colony, the name sounds like a far-off banishment. Waiting, stretched far enough, becomes a kind of exile from ordinary life, a place where parts of the self fall away.

Certainty after death: tossing life away like a rind

The fourth stanza is the poem’s most daring bargain: if it were certain that after this life yours and mine should be, she would toss it yonder like a rind and taste eternity. Calling life a rind is both startling and logical within the poem’s economy. A rind is what you discard to reach the sweetness; it implies that life’s value is conditional, dependent on what it leads to. The tone here briefly turns almost exuberant—taste makes eternity sensuous, not abstract. Yet the extravagance reveals the underlying ache: the speaker is willing to throw away everything she has, but only if the future is guaranteed. Love, in this calculus, is not merely emotional; it is a demand for a contract with time.

The hinge: But now and the collapse of all bargains

Everything changes on But now. The earlier stanzas rely on conditional certainty—If you were coming, If I could see you, If certain—but the final stanza names the real condition: all ignorant of the length. The problem is not delay; it is not knowing whether the delay is a season or a lifetime. With that admission, time stops being an object she can brush, wind, count, or discard. It becomes animated and predatory: It goads me. The verb is physical, like prodding an animal forward, and it implies that time is not neutral passage but active pain.

The goblin bee: suspense as a creature with a hidden sting

The closing simile is one of Dickinson’s most precise inventions: like the goblin bee that will not state its sting. A bee’s torment is partly its sound—its hovering insistence—and partly the uncertainty of when, or whether, it will strike. By calling it goblin, the speaker makes suspense uncanny, a mischievous malice rather than simple fear. And the phrase will not state is crucial: the bee refuses to declare its terms. That refusal is what breaks the speaker’s earlier bravado. She could count centuries if they were honestly numbered; she cannot bear a buzzing that won’t say what it intends. The poem ends not with separation itself, but with the mental cruelty of indefinite waiting.

A sharper question the poem forces: is the beloved the comfort, or the calendar?

It’s tempting to read the poem as pure devotion, but the logic is harsher: the speaker’s peace depends less on reunion than on knowing when reunion will happen. When she says she’d wind the months and stash them away, the fantasy is control, not simply love. Does the beloved function here as a person, or as the one thing that could make time legible?

What the poem finally admits about hope

By escalating from fall to eternity, the poem dramatizes a mind testing the limits of endurance and finding that the limit is not duration but ambiguity. The tone travels from brisk domestic management (brushing away summer, tucking months into drawers) through a darker bodily cost (fingers dropping into Van Diemen’s land) to a near-mystical willingness to discard life itself, before snapping into agitation under the bee’s buzz. The contradiction is that the speaker imagines herself infinitely patient, yet proves she is most vulnerable where she cannot calculate. In that way, the poem becomes less a love lyric than an anatomy of suspense: it shows how the heart can make peace with almost anything—except not knowing how long it must keep making peace.