Emily Dickinson

Apocalypse

Summary


"Apocalypse" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson in which a speaker declares herself a wife and looks back at the girl she used to be. Her tone is clipped and defiant, and she calls herself both Czar and woman. She finds comfort in her new state and pain in the old, yet she refuses to compare them. Her last words are an abrupt command: stop there. Beneath the certainty runs a quiet question about what was lost.

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I’M wife; I’ve finished that,
That other state;
I’m Czar, I’m woman now:
It’s safer so.

How odd the girl’s life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.

This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I’m wife! stop there!

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Credits

Emily Dickinson was a reclusive 19th-century American poet, famed for her compressed lines, dashes and startling slant rhymes. Most of her nearly 1,800 poems appeared only after her death, and this one's title casts a woman's change of status as a moment of revelation.