The Full Text of “My life closed twice before its close”
1My life closed twice before its close;
2It yet remains to see
3If Immortality unveil
4A third event to me,
5So huge, so hopeless to conceive
6As these that twice befel.
7Parting is all we know of heaven,
8And all we need of hell.
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“My life closed twice before its close” Introduction
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In "My life closed twice before its close," Emily Dickinson describes a grief so great it feels like death itself. The poem's speaker has suffered two huge losses, mourning two people they loved deeply. Each time one of these beloved people died, the speaker felt as if their own life had ended, too. Such annihilating pain, the poem reflects, might start to make a person feel skeptical about the prospect of a heavenly eternity. "Parting," loss and death, "is all we know of heaven": in other words, all that people can know about the afterlife is that the dead certainly leave this world. There's no telling where they go afterwards. And the pain of losing a loved one is "all we need of hell." Like almost all of Dickinson's verse, this poem was only published posthumously. It first appeared in the third volume of Dickinson's collected works, Poems (1896).
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“My life closed twice before its close” Summary
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My life ended twice before my real death. I'm still waiting to see if the immortal powers will end my life yet again with a third catastrophe just as vast, terrible, and impossible to wrap one's mind around as the first two were. The fact that we have to part from our loved ones is the only thing we know for sure to be true about death and the afterlife; the pain of saying goodbye, meanwhile, is hell itself.
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“My life closed twice before its close” Themes
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The Life-Destroying Pain of Grief
In "My life closed twice before its close," a speaker describes their agonizing grief. Their life, they explain, has "closed twice": their life ended, that is, both times that someone they loved died. Even as death literally ends a life, it also metaphorically ends the former lives of the people who mourn, leaving them to suffer in a "hell" of grief.
The speaker experiences the deaths of their loved ones as "huge" events that are "hopeless to conceive": in other words, catastrophes so enormous and overwhelming that it's impossible to understand or make sense of them, or to fully imagine how terrible they would feel before they happened. In the face of such inconceivable devastation, the speaker feels that they themselves have died. Their old life, like a locking door, firmly "close[s]" behind them at the moment their loved ones take their last breaths.
Horribly, the speaker's metaphorical death leaves them plenty alive enough to suffer. To experience a "parting" from someone dear to you, the speaker says, is "all we need of hell." In other words, a person doesn't have to literally die in order to feel as if they've died and gone to hell. They can die the death of grief, then endure what feels like eternal torment, all without leaving this unhappy world.
Death, in this poem, thus inevitably strikes twice, killing the actual dead person and all those who loved them in one blow. There's no way to preserve the life one had before a loved one died. And the new life that replaces the old can be so terrible it feels like hell on earth.
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Death, Immortality, and Doubt
Destroyed by grief, this poem's speaker starts to feel skeptical about the thought of a happy afterlife. Though they have some sense that "Immortality" (a personified figure that here behaves like a god) steers the world, they have no confidence that a heavenly immortality awaits them or their loved ones after death.
"Immortality," in this poem, decides the speaker's future and fate. The speaker has already suffered the deaths of two loved ones. Now, they're waiting to see if "Immortality" will "unveil" yet another annihilating grief to them someday.
The idea that a godlike Immortality is in charge of who lives and who dies might seem to fit into a fairly hopeful framework. If Immortality rules human life, then human beings might also have some hope of joining Immortality after they're dead: that is, of going on to an eternal afterlife.
But this poem's speaker has their doubts about that. There's simply no way to know whether there's an afterlife, they point out: "parting," death, is "all we know of heaven." In other words, all that we can say about a possible heavenly eternity is that people certainly leave this world. There's no saying with certainty whether they end up in another one.
Meanwhile, "hell" feels like a much more certain thing. For "parting" is also "all we need of hell": it's a complete and thorough experience of hellish torment, and one that people can experience merely by dying the metaphorical death that grief inflicts on them.
In this speaker's grim vision, something immortal exists. But that immortal force might merely be death itself.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “My life closed twice before its close”
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Line 1
My life closed twice before its close;
This poem's first line introduces a paradox through a repeated word:
My life closed twice before its close;
The speaker feels that they have already died twice, though they have not yet literally died. Dickinson's choice of the word "close" here presents these pre-deaths quietly and gently. If the speaker's former lives "closed," they ended like books or plays do—or they shut like doors. Quietly but firmly, these lives just closed up and were done.
This soft word, it will turn out, is an ominous understatement. Like John Donne before her, Dickinson will describe the way that grieving can feel like dying. Loss, in this poem, destroys a mourner's former life. The mourner is then reborn into a dark and terrible new world. This poem's unfortunate speaker has already been through such a death twice. They also know (as readers will soon see) that there's no assurance they won't suffer yet another.
Dickinson writes this poem in her go-to form: ballad stanzas. That means:
- The poem is written in quatrains, four-line stanzas, and rhymed ABCB.
- These quatrains use common meter—alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "My life | closed twice | before | its close") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "It yet | remains | to see").
Dickinson uses this deceptively simple form, with its easy rhythms and short lines, to communicate immense, complex, and terrible ideas.
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Lines 2-6
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befel.
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Lines 7-8
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
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“My life closed twice before its close” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
Through repetitions, the speaker attempts to capture the experience of an incomprehensible, defeating, and agonizing grief. Their efforts begin in the first line, where they say: "My life closed twice before its close." This moment of polyptoton points out that something has happened to the speaker that seems like it shouldn't be able to happen: their life has ended twice already, and they're still not dead.
This small death, they'll go on to explain, was the result of "event[s]"—the deaths of their loved ones—that were "so huge, so hopeless to conceive." (These disasters, in other words, were overwhelming, impossible to wrap one's mind around.) The anaphora here makes it sound as if the speaker is struggling to encompass their grief in words. They can only repeat that it's "so" big, "so" inconceivable.
The poem's final repetition might be its grimmest:
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.The balanced parallelism here ironically stresses a terrible imbalance in the speaker's experience of grief. They don't feel they can just go ahead and believe that their lost loved ones have gone to "heaven"; "all we know" here on earth is that "parting," death, is unavoidable. Meanwhile, humanity knows all too much about hell: grief is itself a way of metaphorically dying and enduring the torments of the damned.
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Understatement
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Personification
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Alliteration
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“My life closed twice before its close” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Immortality
- Conceive
- Befel
Immortality-
A term here used to suggest an eternal power—perhaps God, perhaps death. "Immortality" was an important word for Dickinson, who often used it ambiguously to describe God, the afterlife, or the immortal soul.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “My life closed twice before its close”
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Form
"My life closed twice before its close" takes its place among many other Dickinson poems on grief and the mysteries of death. Where Dickinson sometimes peers beyond the grave in her death poetry, here she explores grief from right here on earth. One needn't die to experience hell, her speaker proclaims: losing someone you loved is "all we need of hell," an authentic taste of eternal torment.
Dickinson wrote "My life closed twice before its close" in her favorite form: ballad stanzas. That means the poem uses quatrains (four-line stanzas) rhymed ABCB and written in common meter. This meter alternates between lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "My life | closed twice | before | its close") and iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs, as in "It yet | remains | to see").
Common meter (as its name suggests) is a common, old, folksy form, the traditional pulse of hymns and ballads. Dickinson avidly embraced the earthy power of this rhythm. She was also inspired to write in common meter by the example of English Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, who championed a return to simple forms and simple language after decades of elaborate and (to the Romantics' minds) over-refined 18th-century versifying. Dickinson, like Wordsworth, knew that one needn't use elaborate forms to capture powerful, complex feeling.
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Meter
"My life closed twice before its close," like much of Dickinson's poetry, is written in common meter. That means that its lines alternate between:
- Iambic tetrameter: lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "My life | closed twice | before | its close"
- And iambic trimeter: lines of three iambs, as in "It yet | remains | to see"
This deceptively simple meter (often used in folk songs and hymns) was Dickinson's trademark. Here as in other poems, she uses common meter to convey vast, wild feeling in a couple of unassuming, singsong stanzas.
A variation in this poem's meter lends extra power to the closing lines:
Parting | is all | we know | of heaven,
The first foot here is a trochee—the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. The stress up front launches the closing lines with some extra momentum. (Note, too, that "heaven" should be pronounced with just one syllable here, as it is in many 19th-century poems: HEVN, not HEA-ven.)
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Rhyme Scheme
Because it uses the traditional ballad stanza (always Dickinson's go-to), "My life closed twice before its close" also uses the traditional ballad rhyme scheme, which runs like this:
ABCB
This singsong pattern gives special force to the ends of stanzas, training the reader's ear to anticipate the closing B rhyme as a satisfying finale. Here, Dickinson uses the power of this pattern to make the poem land hard on a grim closing word: "hell." The blunt, monosyllabic final rhyme throws the shadow of terrible pain backward over the whole poem.
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“My life closed twice before its close” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a person who has endured not one, but two life-destroying griefs in their time. As they put it, their life has "closed twice before its close": twice, they have lost someone so dear to them that they felt as if their own life had ended. They can now only wait to see if "Immortality" (an important, sometimes ambiguous word for Dickinson, and one which here seems to suggest God or some other eternal power) will destroy them yet again through a "third event," a third annihilating loss.
This speaker's terrible familiarity with grief has given them some perspective on "Immortality" in another sense, too. Their losses have led them to reflect on the afterlife, and not in a tremendously hopeful light. "Parting," they say, is "all we know of heaven": in other words, the only thing we can say for sure about what happens after death is that we have to lose the people we love to some unknown other world. Heaven is an uncertain place for this speaker, then, but hell a fact: "parting" itself, losing a loved one, is hell on earth.
This speaker thus comes across as a person harrowed and battered by grief, one who knows that living in the mortal world means dying the death of loss many times before one's actual death.
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“My life closed twice before its close” Setting
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There's no clear setting in this poem. The themes the speaker treats here are timeless, placeless, and universal: the agony of grief isn't confined to any one era.
However, it's easy to imagine this poem taking place in Dickinson's time and place—19th-century Massachusetts—and Dickinson's own mind. The speaker's sense of a presiding "Immortality" (a word that Dickinson often turned to when she wrote about death) seems to draw on Dickinson's own complex and sometimes ambivalent Christian faith. So does the speaker's uncertainty and unease around how little we "know of heaven"—especially compared to the certainty that we'll all have to suffer the pains of "hell," which strike (in the form of grief and loss) even before one dies.
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Literary and Historical Context of “My life closed twice before its close”
Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published almost nothing during her lifetime, and after 1865 she rarely left her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. But from within her circumscribed world, she explored the heights and depths of human experience through her groundbreaking poetry.
No one else sounds quite like Dickinson. Her poems use simple, folksy forms—ballad stanzas, for instance—to explore profound philosophical questions, passionate loves, and the mysteries of nature. Her characteristic dashes make many of her lines seem to hold their breath in awe or in pain.
While Dickinson didn't get too involved in the literary world of her time, she was still part of a swell of 19th-century American innovation. Her contemporary Walt Whitman (who became as famous as Dickinson was obscure) was similarly developing an unprecedented and unique poetic voice, and the Transcendentalists (like Emerson and Thoreau) shared her deep belief in the spiritual power of nature. Dickinson herself was inspired by English writers like William Wordsworth and Charlotte Brontë, whose works similarly found paths through the everyday world into the sublime, terrifying, and astonishing.
"My life closed twice before its close" was first published in the third posthumous volume of Dickinson's work, Poems (1896). We can't be quite sure when Dickinson composed this poem (though some scholars guess it was probably a later work). Only a handful of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime; most were written on odd scraps of paper, stored in a trunk, and rescued by Dickinson's sister Lavinia after Dickinson's death. The only extant copy of this poem isn't in Dickinson's hand. Rather, it was copied out by Mabel Loomis Todd, a member of the complex and scandal-ridden network of friends and relations who salvaged and published Dickinson's work.
Historical Context
It's not unreasonable to imagine that this poem draws on Dickinson's experience of grief. Dickinson faced many terrible losses over the course of her life. One of the most painful among these was the death of her beloved nephew Gilbert (known to all as Gib) in 1883 at the age of only eight years old.
Gib was the baby of the family, the third son of Dickinson's brother Austin and his wife Susan, Dickinson's close friend (and, many believe, her onetime beloved). A charming, precocious child, Gib was a great favorite with Dickinson. His surviving letter to Santa Claus suggests he was a delight: "Please bring me whatever you think best," he wrote. "I don’t mean a spanking I mean some common place toys."
When Gib became ill with typhoid fever, Dickinson did something she almost never did at that stage in her life: she left the family home and went to her brother's house. There, she sat at Gib's bedside as he died.
There's no way to know exactly when Dickinson wrote this poem, or which world-ending deaths its speaker might have been thinking of. But readers can be sadly sure that Dickinson wrote of grief from experience.
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More “My life closed twice before its close” Resources
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External Resources
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — Visit the excellent website of the Emily Dickinson Museum to find a wealth of resources on Dickinson's life and work.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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The Emily Dickinson Archive — Explore Dickinson's manuscripts (many of them preserved on odd, scattered scraps of paper) through the Emily Dickinson Archive.
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Dickinson's Legacy — Read an account of Dickinson's poetic career by her friend, correspondent, and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Dickinson's life through the Poetry Foundation's short biography.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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