Early last week, I started a series of posts on Helen Vendler’s Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, and I promised to share info on two of Vendler’s studies that focused on Dickinson’s effective use of rhyme. In yesterday’s post, I discussed Vendler’s analysis of “The morns are meeker than they were” and why the poet rhymed “brown,” “town,” and “gown” (from lines 2, 4, and 6) with “on” (at the end of line 8). Today I have details on the second poem, “These are the days when Birds come back,” and like yesterday’s, today's post focuses on the structure of the poem as related to its rhyme scheme.
 | Very succinctly, Vendler summarizes the poem with this: “The poem goes in and out of direct address to its ‘Indian Summer’ (the title the first editors gave it). Dickinson addresses the season as ‘Oh fraud,’ ‘Oh sacrament,’ and ‘Oh Last Communion’ – epithets summing up in brief the evolving course of her feelings.” Of its form, Vendler adds this: “Although the poem was cast, in all of Dickinson’s fair copies, into six stanzas, its rhyme shapes it into three parts, rhyming (except for lines one and two) aabccb…two tetrameter couplets, each followed by a trimeter which binds, by its rhyme, every two stanzas together, making three double stanzas.” |
There is much more to her summary, but she wraps up her commentary with this incredible breakdown of the work’s structure:
“Why does Dickinson make her six-stanza poem also a three-part one (by rhyme) and a two-part one (turning on the hinge-word ‘Till’)? The six stanza shape represents the six temporal segments of her evolving plot, from ‘These are the days’ to a ‘last Communion”; the three rhyming-units (introduced by ‘These are’; ‘Oh fraud’; and ‘Oh Sacrament’) track her emotional changes from objectivity through resentment to yearning; and the solemn binary shape, divided by the ‘Till’ to which the seeds bear reliable witness, leads us to – and from -- the cusp where the balm of Indian Summer returns to the ‘altered air’ of true autumn . . . so that we are here reading three poems at once: a poem of six parts, another of three parts, and another of two parts.”
By the way, Vendler notes of this poem, “Because Dickinson does not repeat this strategy, the form remains unique.”
“Why does Dickinson make her six-stanza poem also a three-part one (by rhyme) and a two-part one (turning on the hinge-word ‘Till’)? The six stanza shape represents the six temporal segments of her evolving plot, from ‘These are the days’ to a ‘last Communion”; the three rhyming-units (introduced by ‘These are’; ‘Oh fraud’; and ‘Oh Sacrament’) track her emotional changes from objectivity through resentment to yearning; and the solemn binary shape, divided by the ‘Till’ to which the seeds bear reliable witness, leads us to – and from -- the cusp where the balm of Indian Summer returns to the ‘altered air’ of true autumn . . . so that we are here reading three poems at once: a poem of six parts, another of three parts, and another of two parts.”
By the way, Vendler notes of this poem, “Because Dickinson does not repeat this strategy, the form remains unique.”
| Below: The poem as "three parts":  | Below: The poem as "two parts":  |
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