In eight lines, Dickinson makes a living speaker measure her own grave
Emily Dickinson's speaker was never afraid of dying, except that death would part her from the person she loved. Now life has done the parting instead. So she asks to be handed back to death, lies breathing in her own grave, and finds it as vast as hell and heaven combined.
The poem is a single swerving thought. It opens with a request, as if continuing an argument already underway: give me back to death. The speaker explains that death never frightened her in itself; its only threat was that it would take away the beloved "thee". The joke, a grim one, is that life has now robbed her anyway, so the old fear has lost its point.
The middle lines deliver the central image. Deprived by life, she breathes inside her own grave and sets about estimating its dimensions. A living person surveying her burial plot is a startling picture, halfway between despair and dark humour, and the dashes make the lines feel like someone catching her breath.
The ending supplies the measurement. The grave's size, she says, is everything hell can imagine and everything heaven used to be. Loss here is not a small hole but a space large enough to hold both extremes of the afterlife, and the past tense attached to heaven suggests paradise was the beloved, now gone.
The Poetry Foundation credits Dickinson with inventing an elliptical language for what was possible but not yet realised, and this poem shows the method: missing connectives, sudden leaps, abstractions treated as places. Her roots ran deep in New England. Paternal ancestors had crossed the Atlantic in the Puritan Great Migration two centuries before her birth and prospered there. The family tree also held musical branches; through distant cousin Baxter Dickinson she was related to the organist and composer Clarence Dickinson.
Source: So give me back to Death --
