"There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" Explication

The very first line sets the tone for the rest of the poem. Same as the title, “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House,” introduces a dark and ominous image. The imagery of the house is particularly potent because of how it is descried. The house is described as having a “numb look”. Numbness is associated with lacking sensation or a dead-like state of being. The diction Dickinson uses helps create an image of what the house looks like but also what it feels like in the neighborhood after someone dies.  Though a death occurs that day, people still run errands in and out of their homes and the doctor leaves and goes back to his other work. Though there is no specific language that says this, the narrative structure helps infer that these events happen and also makes it sound like it happens all the time or at least very frequently.

An action interrupts the second stanza with a window opening “Abrupt-mechanically” the dash marks between words have repeated between different words throughout the entire poem, almost like an interjection. The dash serves as a pause in the narration as if the speaker was taking a moment to reflect on what they just said or to digest what they just said. However, they continue on with the series of events which includes throwing away a mattress that may have belonged to or touched the corpse. Children run away and wonder about the mattress. There is an ambiguous pronoun reference in line three in stanza four, “They wonder if it died there-on that-“the corpse is referred to as “it” making it seem though it really is not anything anymore. The whole time one reads the poem they imagine a dead person, where in reality they do not know because the poet makes it vague and uncertain. It also presents and interesting question as to whether it was actually or a person or, possibly, after we die, are we not considered people anymore?

Dickinson has a very peculiar line in which she writes, “I used to-when a Boy” it brings an image or a feeling of a flashback that the narrator has. The line comes right after the children wonder who or what might have died on the mattress. It enhances the eerie tone of the story and makes the reader wonder if maybe the “boy” the narrator is speaking of had died in the neighborhood previously. The vague statement allows the reader to wonder and even fear what the narrator means. The narrative structure continues with the arrival of the minister in the home and making his presence known, “As if the house were His-And He owned all the Mourners.” The second part of the phrase is in active voice in saying the minister “owned” the Mourners almost making people in grief and sadness his property and his job to take care of. It is an odd way of phrasing it considering ministers are supposed to be seen as comforting figures.  Nevertheless, the structure continues with the milliner coming with new black mourning hats and people coming to measure the house to make sure the coffin fits; all usual necessities for when someone has died. The narrator has almost an inclusive knowledge of how someone dies works, more so than how other people would.

There is one single line in which the poet writes “There’ll be that Dark Parade-“ The way she presents the line makes it stand out not only because it stands on its own but because it creates a symbol that obviously means something to the narrator. They continue to describe the parade and what it entails and concludes the poem with “The Intuition of the News-In just a Country Town”. The last line is poignant and direct in analyzing its way of handling morbid issues like death.  The overall syntax was also important throughout the poem and helped enhance the overall mood the story evokes.