Dickinson's spring poem ends by paying its workers with a coffin stand
In eight lines, Emily Dickinson announces spring like a posted bulletin, tells her heart to down tools and sit somewhere rosy, and then pulls the rug away. The wages for even the longest working day, she concludes, amount to nothing but a bier. It is a holiday notice with a funeral hidden inside.
The first stanza reads almost like office language. Spring is not a burst of blossom but "The Notice", something posted in advance, and it is due in about a month. The speaker orders her heart to put away its hoary work, grey with age and winter, and to take a rosy chair instead. Rest and colour are promised, and the tone is brisk and cheerful.
The second stanza complicates the invitation. Flowers keep no house, she observes, so they own nothing and store nothing; birds charm worry itself. Then the metaphor of labour returns with a jolt. Whatever salary we earn, even on the longest day of the year, is merely a bier, the frame on which a coffin is carried. The poem's seasonal cheer suddenly sits beside the plain fact of death.
That swerve shows how Dickinson compresses opposites. The capitalised nouns, Heart, Chair, Flowers, Birds and Bier, stand like signposts, and the short lines leave out the connecting logic, so readers must work out for themselves whether the ending undoes the holiday or gives it urgency. If life pays only in mortality, perhaps the rosy chair is worth taking now.
The businesslike vocabulary came from a household steeped in public affairs. Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, at the family Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, a large mansion her grandfather Samuel Dickinson, a founder of Amherst College, had built in 1813. Her father Edward, a lawyer, served as the college's treasurer from 1835 to 1873 and sat in the 33rd U.S. Congress from 1853 to 1855. The family was prominent, though not wealthy.
Source: The Notice that is called the Spring
