Emily Dickinson

My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close My life closed twice before its close-- It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. A paradox is a statement which contains apparently opposing or incongrous elements which, when read together, turn out to make sense. The first line …

…now absent from American culture. However, the sixty years that separate the creation of these two poems seems to have provided a degree if sophistication which has made Wallace Stevens’ vision of death at home a vision shared by all of his readers. Both poems have a sense of multiple emotion, but Stevens’ poem is much more realized, the emotions much more original, which in the end makes his much more memorable than Dickinson’s.