In Dickinson's spring flood, the soul stops missing dry land
Emily Dickinson pictures spring as a flood that washes away the house but leaves the water intact. The soul, cast adrift, gropes at first for a shoreline. Then it adjusts, and by the final line it no longer longs for the little peninsula it once called home.
The poem runs to two quatrains and a single long thought. Spring arrives not as blossom but as an inundation, and its effect is to enlarge every soul. The flood carries off the tenement, a word for a dwelling that can also suggest the body as a temporary lodging, while the water itself stays whole. In the second stanza the soul finds itself floating in that water. At first it feels estranged and searches weakly for its shore; once acclimated, it "pines no more" for the Peninsula it left behind.
What makes the piece unsettling is that the loss is presented as growth. Being swept out of one's narrow house is an expansion, and the final contentment reads as either spiritual freedom or a quiet surrender, depending on how the reader hears it. The rhymes are typical of her: "soul" chimes with "whole", and "shore" with "more", while the dashes hold each line open like water between islands.
The idea of a house that dominates a life had deep roots in her family. Her grandfather Samuel Dickinson, one of the founders of Amherst College, built the Homestead in 1813, a large mansion on the town's main street that anchored the family for most of a century. Their ancestors had crossed to New England two hundred years earlier during the Puritan Great Migration and done well there.
Her father, Edward, was a lawyer who served as treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, sat in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, and spent 1853 to 1855 in the United States Congress. He married Emily Norcross of Monson in 1828, and their three children were Austin, Emily and Lavinia. The poet was born at the Homestead on December 10, 1830, into a family that was prominent without being rich.
Source: The inundation of the Spring
