There's Been A Death In The Opposite House Analysis

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“There's Been a Death in The Opposite House” by Emily Dickinson is a poem that explains the routine-like process of death that occurs in the town. It elaborates on how the speaker and people of the town view death as a common occurrence. The repetition of the title in the first line contributes to the overall theme of this poem. The death in this small town juxtaposes with death as a whole which makes the reader wonder how death would be perceived in the world rather than just in a small neighborhood. The poem starts off by informing the reader that there has been “a death in the opposite house” in which the speaker is observing from his own house. He also states that he can tell that someone died “by the numb look, such houses have …show more content…

It seems as if the minister owns all the mourners because he may be coming to this neighborhood often due to the frequency of the deaths in the area, and he has gotten used to doing this same job. When a mattress is thrown out of a house, the author states that the neighborhood children “wondered if it died on that.” The “it” refers to the corpse of the person who died. This stanza shows a flashback in the speaker's life to when he could relate to the children as he states that he “used to when a boy.” The past tense used in the line leads the reader to think that the speaker has been involved in or observed many deaths since he was a child.
The speaker also uses future tense to foreshadow that there will be a “dark parade of tassels and of coaches soon” to show that the parade takes place every time someone dies in this neighborhood. The “parade” that the speaker mentions is the funeral procession that will take place for the deceased. The poet uses the “tassels” and “coaches” as imagery for the coaches that carry the coffin and the tassels that are hung on them. The use of future tense in this line causes the reader to believe that events like this have happened so often that the speaker can predict what takes place after a

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