Twas Just This Time, Last Year, I Died
poem 445
Twas Just This Time, Last Year, I Died - meaning Summary
Imagining Death and Return
The speaker recounts having "died" the previous year in a quiet, rural scene and reflects on small domestic concerns: corn and harvest, who would miss them, Thanksgiving plates, and Christmas stockings. These practical, almost comic worries reveal attachment to family routines. The poem shifts from imagining absence and its effects to a consoling reversal: instead of lingering on loss, the speaker pictures a future year when loved ones return to them.
Read Complete Analyses‘Twas 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 the Carts 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 would it blur the Christmas glee My Stocking hang too high For any Santa Claus to reach The Altitude of me But this sort, grieved myself, And so, I thought the other way, How just this time, some perfect year Themself, should come to me
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