Emily Dickinson scolds the winter snow for how it treats a fresh grave
In just eight lines, Emily Dickinson turns to the falling snow and gives it an order. Someone new lies under it this winter, resting for the first time in the ground. The speaker demands that snow wrap this newcomer in a richer blanket than it gives the dead already used to the cold.
The first quatrain names the situation without ever saying the word grave. Beneath the snow's cold softness, some who have never lain there before are taking their first rest this winter. Then, abruptly, the speaker addresses the snow directly and warns it: "I admonish Thee". Snow becomes a person who can be lectured, and the mourner becomes its stern supervisor.
The second quatrain spells out the request. The neighbour we have only just laid down deserves a more generous covering than the creatures already accustomed to lying there. The poem ends on a question rather than a command, asking whether the austere snow will obey. That shift from warning to asking lets grief show through: the speaker cannot actually control the weather, and knows it.
Dickinson grew up with a burial ground in plain view. Around 1840 her father bought a large house on North Pleasant Street in Amherst, and the property looked out over the town's cemetery, which one local minister called treeless and forbidding. Her brother Austin later joked that he and Emily ruled the place as lord and lady whenever their parents were away.
Glimpses of her childhood suggest a lively, musical girl. During a long visit to Monson at the age of two, an aunt named Lavinia reported that she was contented and little trouble, and noted her gift for the piano, which the toddler called "the moosic". She went to primary school in a two-storey building on Pleasant Street, and her father, often away on business, wrote home urging his children to keep studying so they could report how many new things they had learned.
Source: Snow beneath whose chilly softness
