A wedding procession that turns out to be a funeral, in Dickinson's hands
Carriages line up, guests gather, relatives kneel to kiss a lovely forehead. Emily Dickinson stages every sign of a bride leaving home, then tells us she went "the Darker Way". Any suitor now must pass a pane of crystal and reach paradise himself to win her answer.
The poem runs through seven quatrains, and its trick is to borrow the rituals of marriage for a death. A young woman takes her turn to leave the family house, and the scene has all the bustle of a celebration, but the speaker insists it is no holiday. No bride ever drew such a crowd, she says, and no kinsmen ever bent so low to honour a face, which itself becomes the garland.
Middle stanzas praise the dead woman's feet and brow as finer than anything snow or lilies could lend. Then the poem shifts to the language of courtship. Whoever asks her father for her hand must aim as high as a desert palm straining for the sky. Her only movement now is distance, and nobody can tell whether her silence means yes or no.
The final stanza sets the terms for any would-be husband. He has to get past "the Crystal Angle" hiding her face and must reach "Equal Paradise" in person. The hard dashes break almost every line, so the procession seems to stop and start, like mourners pausing.
Dickinson knew the weight of a family house. Her grandfather Samuel, a founder of Amherst College, built the Homestead on the town's main street in 1813, and it anchored Dickinson life for close to a century. Her father Edward served as the college's treasurer from 1835 to 1873 and sat in Congress between 1853 and 1855. He had married Emily Norcross of Monson in 1828, and the couple raised three children: Austin, Emily and Lavinia. The poet herself was born in that Homestead in December 1830.
Source: PoetryDB — Her Sweet turn to leave the Homestead · Public domain (GB: author died 1886, life+70 expired; US: first published 1896, on or before 1930)
