If I should die

Dickinson published only seven of her more than 1,700 poems during her lifetime, so providing any one of her poems with an appropriate (and accurate) historical context is challenging. In filing her unpublished poems, Dickinson tended to bunch them by category—poems about nature, poems about love, poems about death—rather than in any chronological ordering. As her poems began to find their way to publication long after her death in 1886, it became something of a parlor game to try to find some keys in the poems themselves to when they might have been written.

That endeavor underscores the special nature of the historical context of Dickinson’s poems in that they almost entirely lack the reassuring anchorage in the era of their composition. Poem 54, however, is the exception that proves the rule, the exception because the poem’s second half evidences Dickinson’s familiarity with a very real historic event, and as such Poem 54 represents a unicorn in the Dickinson oeuvre, a poem directly generated by its historic context.

Dickinson composed Poem 54 in late 1857, the year the financial markets along the East Coast were shaken by a catastrophic panic over how the nation’s gold supply suddenly could not cover the country’s steadily mounting debts.