So has a Daisy vanished
From the fields today —
So tiptoed many a slipper
To Paradise away —

Oozed so in crimson bubbles
Day’s departing tide —
Blooming — tripping — flowing
Are ye then with God?

Analysis, meaning and summary of Emily Dickinson's poem So has a Daisy vanished

5 Comments

  1. Avril says:

    This is one of emily’s more depressing poems. I like it though. It is really deep is you think about it!

  2. katie says:

    i wanted to know what this poem meant. Im not sure exactly and i need some help to discover the meaning.

  3. Jennifer Reeder says:

    This meaning inocenses has gone
    I find Emily the greatest female poet ever

  4. Richard Nanian says:

    Your question was a while ago, so you may not be checking this, but on the off-chance you are —

    It seems unlikely to me that Dickinson would have known about a rejected title for “The Scarlet Letter.” Yes, Hawthorne had lived in Emerson’s family home (the “Old Manse” in Concord) long before, and Dickinson read everything Emerson wrote and almost certainly attended his lectures in Amherst (he had stayed next door to Emily, at her brother Austin and sister-in-law Susan’s house). But I know of no evidence Emerson knew of the title change, and he certainly didn’t write or speak publicly about it. Besides, this poem doesn’t connect thematically with “The Scarlet Letter” in any way. The “crimson tide” is the sunset; Dickinson’s description of the sunlight as liquid — both the water of a tide and the “crimson bubbles” that “oozed,” which suggests blood — are classic examples of literary synaeshesia, i.e. describing the impressions of one sense with vocabulary normally associated with a different sense. She turns the death of a flower into a symbol for (possibly violent or at least bloody) human death, then asks if the flower is “with God.” This is an early stab (pun intended) at themes over which she would always obsess: death and her skeptical view of an afterlife.

  5. Andrew Lyu says:

    I noticed the key words of “Crimson” and “Tide” and was wondering if that had any relation with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. I think i heard that “Crimson Tide” or something to that effect was a proposed title for the book. Nevertheless, was Dickinson influenced by Hawthorne’s perception of transcendentalism or Puritan society during that time?

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