T Was Just This Time Last Year I Died.
T Was Just This Time Last Year I Died. - meaning Summary
Playful Meditation on Mortality
The poem stages a speaker who imagines having died a year earlier and remembers rural, seasonal details—corn tassels, apples, pumpkins—through the lens of that imagined absence. Domestic concerns such as whether family would adjust Thanksgiving plates or reach her stocking at Christmas mingle with darker reflection, turning small anxieties into a sly meditation on mortality and absence. The voice balances domestic, almost childlike worry with a quiet acceptance of death and an anticipation of a future reunion when “themselves should come to me,” turning ordinary holiday imagery into a vehicle for existential thought.
Read Complete Analyses‘T was just this time last year I died. I know I heard the corn, When I was carried by the farms,– It had the tassels on. I thought how yellow it would look When Richard went to mill; And then I wanted to get out, But something held my will. I thought just how red apples wedged The stubble’s joints between; And carts went stooping round the fields To take the pumpkins in. I wondered which would miss me least, And when Thanksgiving came, If father’d multiply the plates To make an even sum. And if my stocking hung too high, Would it blur the Christmas glee, That not a Santa Claus could reach The altitude of me? But this sort grieved myself, and so I thought how it would be When just this time, some perfect year, Themselves should come to me.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.