Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door,
Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore —

Analysis, meaning and summary of Emily Dickinson's poem Not knowing when the Dawn will come,

1 Comment

  1. Diane Balch says:

    Dawn is the beginning of the day. Not knowing when it will come means that the narrator doesn’t know when a new beginning will happen, so she opens doors looking for it. She is not certain what this new beginning will look like if it will be feathered like a bird, meaning will it come from the sky, which could be symbolically from God or Heaven or will it be billows like a shore. Billows are a mass of something, the opposite of sky which doesn’t appear to have mass. A shore is a defined area unlike a sky. So the narrator questions will the new beginning be a messenger from the heavens, a bird or a mass, like billows on a shore that are definitely from the earth. A spiritual beginning represented by a bird, unbound by earth, or a material beginning, represented by the billows of most likely waves at the shore.

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