68 Poetry for Students

bustle that opens the poem is a counterpoint to the

weighty word, “Eternity,” with which it ends. The

poem is filled with similar contrasts. It is set on

“the Morning after Death,” setting up a contrast be-

tween the night, with its associated darkness and

surrender of consciousness, and the day that in-

evitably follows—and with it, life’s mundane but

unstoppable flow.

In the second stanza, Dickinson extends her

central metaphor. After a death in the house, life

goes on with “the sweeping up the Heart / And

putting Love Away.” Thus, it becomes clear that

she is not just talking about the general cleaning

and straightening up of house that continues to be

necessary even after the occurrence of a death

within its walls, or even the more intimate and dra-

matic preparations of the body. Rather, she uses

such activity to symbolize the internal, emotional

activity of mourning. In “The Bustle in a House”

she describes a housekeeping of the heart that must

go on even after it has experienced a great loss. For

Dickinson—who lived an adventuresome life of the

mind between the same four walls of the house

where she was born—home is, foremost, a

metaphor for the self. Homes and houses in her po-

etry represent different dimensions of selfhood-

consciousness, the mind, imagination, and spirit.

To die is, then, to surrender the only known home

of the self, rather than to “come home” to God, as

the prevalent theological metaphor would have it.

Witnessing a death is a partial loss of self for Dick-

inson; it requires a setting aside of a piece of the

self—one’s love for the deceased—until “Eter-

nity,” a concept impossibly abstract for the home-

bound, grieving heart to comprehend.

“The Bustle in a House” does not offer the re-

assurances of either Home in an all-powerful God

or those of a homey afterlife that is not so differ-

ent from the world we know. In the poem death is

simultaneously an intimately familiar event and one

of awesome mystery. What is familiar and home-

like is the love of the deceased that the living carry

with them. Eternity is, by definition, not-home, a

radically other and unknown place. The living are

stuck in the metaphorical houses of themselves, in

a place or state radically disconnected from Eter-

nity—disconnected except for the ties of love for

the dead that the living must struggle to “put away.”

Source:Sarah Madsen Hardy, in an essay for Poetry for

Students,Gale, 2001.

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton teaches American

literature and directs the writing center at a col-

lege in Texas. In this essay she discusses Dickin-

son’s use of domestic imagery in her poems about

death and dying.

Readers who encounter only a handful of Dick-

inson’s poems remark how frequently she writes

about death and dying. Her interest in the moment

of death is not surprising to critics who recognize,

like Adrienne Rich noted, that “she is theAmeri-

can poet whose work consisted in exploring states

of psychic extremity.” Less critical attention has

been paid to domestic life and work, another per-

sistent theme in her poetry.

These activities, which include sweeping, dust-

ing and other household labors, have been over-

looked for a couple of reasons. First, early critics

belonging to the male literary establishment would

have read her use of domestic imagery as an indi-

cator of her femininity and reclusiveness. Then, the

first feminist critics of the 1970s devoted little at-

tention to her domestic imagery because its identi-

fication with “women’s work” made their project

of reconstructing her as a feminist more difficult.

More recent critics, primarily feminists, however,

understand her use of domestic imagery in more

subtle ways. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, for example,

notes that “many of the poems that give voice to

despair most forcefully and poignantly are strung

together with this stabilizing imagery from the do-

mestic world.” “The Bustle in the House,” together

with another poem, “How many times these low

feet staggered” reveal Dickinson’s deft and layered

The Bustle in a House

What

Do I Read

Next?

• A Room of One’s Ownby Virginia Wolf makes
  the argument that women cannot be great writ-
  ers until they create domestic space in order to
  read and write and think.


• Diary of Emily Dickinson(1993) by Jamie Fuller
  and illustrated by Marlene McLoughlin is a fic-
  tional account of the poet’s inner life and in-
  cludes several poems written in Dickinson’s
  style by Fuller, herself a poet.