English · Chapter 18
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Emily Dickinson (1830 to 1886) was an American poet who spent almost her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing nearly 1,800 short poems, only a handful of which appeared in print while she lived. "A Day" is the title given by early editors to the poem that begins "I'll tell you how the sun rose", written around 1860 and first published in the collection of 1890, after her death. It is a sixteen-line lyric in the loose ballad or hymn form Dickinson favoured, with short lines, slant rhyme and a compressed, riddling manner. On the surface it describes a sunrise and a sunset; underneath, it is a poem about knowledge, mystery, and the passage from life into death.
The poem falls into two clear movements: eight lines on the sunrise and eight lines on the sunset.
The speaker opens with the confident promise, "I'll tell you how the sun rose", as if she has watched it carefully and can report exactly what happened. The sun rises "a ribbon at a time", a strip of coloured light unrolling along the horizon. As the light spreads, "the steeples swam in amethyst": the church towers appear to float in a violet-purple glow. The news of morning spreads quickly, "like squirrels", darting from place to place. The hills "untied their bonnets", shaking off the mist or darkness that had covered them like a woman's head-covering, and the bobolinks, small American songbirds, begin to sing. Everything in the first movement is quick, bright and cheerful. The speaker then says "softly to myself, 'That must have been the sun!'", a playful remark that pretends the sunrise was so wonderful she could hardly be sure what she had seen.
The second movement begins with an admission: "But how he set, I know not." The certainty of the morning has gone. The speaker can only report what "seemed" to happen. She sees a "purple stile", a set of steps for climbing over a fence, coloured by the dusk. "Little yellow boys and girls" climb it "all the while", the golden rays of the setting sun pictured as children clambering over the fence at the end of a day's play. When they reach "the other side", a "dominie in gray" appears. A dominie is an old Scottish word for a schoolmaster or a minister. This grey-clad figure, dusk itself, "put gently up the evening bars", closing the gate as evening falls, and "led the flock away", taking the children, or the last rays, or the day itself, off out of sight.
Read literally, the poem is a delicate picture of dawn and dusk. Read more deeply, the sunrise stands for birth, youth and the busy energy of life, which we can observe and describe, while the sunset stands for death, which no one has watched from the inside. The children who climb over the stile to "the other side" and are led away by a gentle, shepherd-like teacher suggest souls passing quietly from this world to the next. The poem does not say this openly; it leaves the reader, like the speaker, on this side of the stile, looking at a mystery.