A bare winter tree turns away visitors until its April bonnet arrives
In just four lines, Emily Dickinson turns a leafless tree into a Victorian lady declining visitors. It sends word that it is not at home to callers, mentions that its new bonnet is expected in April, and wishes you good day. Winter becomes a polite social excuse.
The joke borrows the language of the drawing room, the formal phrasing of someone declining to receive visitors, and Dickinson hands it to a naked tree. Its bare branches are not dead, merely indisposed, because the lady has nothing suitable to wear. The bonnet due in April is new spring foliage, and the parting good wishes complete the picture of courteous refusal.
The poem is tiny, but it shows habits that run through her work: nature treated with personal familiarity, lines kept extremely short, and a double meaning compressed into a single image. Mortality hovers faintly too, since a tree that looks lifeless is really waiting out the season.
The Dickinsons were a prominent Amherst family, and the poet's father led a very public life. Edward Dickinson kept the books of Amherst College as its treasurer from 1835 until 1873, sat in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature and represented the state's 10th district in the 33rd Congress between 1853 and 1855. He had married Emily Norcross of Monson in May 1828, and their three children were Austin, born in 1829, Emily, and Lavinia, who arrived in 1833.
Emily herself lived from 1830 to 1886 and was largely unknown as a poet while alive. Today she is considered one of the central figures of American literature, a reputation built almost entirely on work that stayed in manuscript during her lifetime. The Poetry Foundation credits her with a distinctively elliptical language for voicing what could be but had not yet come to pass.
Source: PoetryDB — Not at Home to Callers · Public domain (GB: author died 1886, life+70 expired; US: first published 1896, on or before 1930)
