Emily Dickinson imagined heaven as a school day with no recess
Most hymns promise that paradise will feel like home. Emily Dickinson's speaker flatly refuses: heaven sounds like an endless Sunday where playtime never arrives, watched over by a God who never naps. The only thing stopping her running away is the small matter of Judgement Day.
The poem is sixteen short lines in four stanzas, and it reads like a sulky child reasoning her way out of church. She admits she never felt settled on earth and predicts she will feel no better in the lovely skies above. Her objection to paradise is not theological but practical: it is "Sunday -- all the time --", a day of best clothes and good behaviour stretched into eternity, and Eden will feel lonely on the bright weekday afternoons she actually enjoys.
The second half turns God into a surveillance problem. If only He would pay a visit, or doze off, she might slip away, but she has been told that He is Himself a telescope, forever looking at us. She would happily flee from Father, Holy Ghost and everything else. The final line snaps the fantasy shut with a comic sigh, since the Judgement Day is waiting whichever way she runs.
School imagery was close to hand for Dickinson. Her early education on Pleasant Street in Amherst was unusually classical for a Victorian girl, and her father, a lawyer, kept track of his children's lessons even while travelling; when she was seven he wrote home asking them to report what new things they had learned. She then spent seven years at Amherst Academy studying Latin, botany, geology and mental philosophy, and its principal, Daniel Taggart Fiske, remembered her as very bright.
Only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems reached print in her lifetime. The traits now called groundbreaking are all visible here: clipped, sharp lines, spare description and rhymes that only half land, such as skies with Paradise and Nap with Telescope.
Source: I never felt at Home -- Below
