Emily Dickinson

When reading “The name- of it- is ‘Autumn’” I thought a lot about what we did in class on Wed and where, in my mind, I add the punctuation This really does help me organize Dickinson’s writing and develop a reading of the text. The first two lines are sentences of their own in my mind, but they go together as if in a stanza of their own because the second line describes the subject, “Autumn,” introduced in the first. The next three lines continue this description of the subject and its color, making the color alive and real, not only describing the color but making a metaphor of the subject and blood. Then in the seventh line begins another metaphor of the blood. The winds (which in the other poem we discussed on Wed were associated with will and revolution) turns over a basin filled with blood and the blood “sprinkles” as rain. The basin and blood are acting the part of nature to bring rain, a substance needed to survive. Blood is also needed to survive but in “sprinkling” like rain, it means that life has been lost. The last stanza shows the effects of the blood being spilt. The blood falls upon lady’s bonnets, which I took to mean that the war affects the home and hearth in violent ways although not many women saw the front lines of battle or had to face oncoming enemy on the battlefield. The women are confronted by the battles from “far” away and the blood, pain and loss affects them by staining their lives and homes. The blood not only sprinkles upon them, but gathers around them in puddles. The effects of war do not just end with the end of war. The loss of husbands, children, and fathers affected the homestead long after news of the death of a loved one reached the family. The sadness and pain gathers, and the people lost to the war slowly drift away.