Emily Dickinson

A wife at daybreak I shall be,

A WIFE at daybreak I shall be,
Sunrise, hast thou a flag for me?
At midnight I am yet a maid—
How short it takes to make it bride!
Then, Midnight, I have passed from thee

East and Victory

East = sunrise = marriage, but also death. Dickinson uses 'East' elsewhere for heaven. The victory might not be what it seems.

Unto the East and Victory.
Midnight, "Good night"
I hear them call.
The angels bustle in the hall,

angels bustle

Wedding guests or death angels? 'Bustle' is domestic, mundane—angels preparing for her arrival in heaven, not at an altar.

Future climbs

Her 'Future' is personified as someone approaching her room. Could be a groom, could be death—both climb stairs to claim her.

Softly my Future climbs the stair,
I fumble at my childhood's prayer—
So soon to be a child no more!
Eternity, I'm coming, Sir,—

Eternity, I'm coming, Sir

She addresses Eternity (death/God) with the same formal 'Sir' she used for powerful men in letters. This isn't a human groom.

seen that face before

Final twist: she recognizes this 'Master.' Death/God isn't a stranger but someone she's already encountered, perhaps in visions or poems.

Master, I've seen that face before.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Marriage as Death Metaphor

CONTEXT Dickinson never married and wrote obsessively about both marriage and death, often conflating them. This poem pretends to be about a wedding night but reveals itself as something darker.

The temporal structure is the key: midnight to daybreak, maid to wife. But notice what she's actually describing—angels in the hall, addressing Eternity and Master, recognizing a face she's 'seen before.' These aren't wedding details. The 'bride' imagery is a cover for dying.

The 'East and Victory' line clinches it. In Dickinson's lexicon, East consistently means death/heaven (the sun rises but also souls rise). The 'victory' isn't marital—it's the Christian triumph over death. She's using the wedding-night transition (maid to wife) as a metaphor for the death transition (mortal to immortal).

The poem repeats itself exactly—all 14 lines appear twice. This isn't a printing error but Dickinson's manuscript choice. The repetition mimics a loop, perhaps the moment of death replaying, or the way time collapses at the threshold between life and death.

The Master Figure

CONTEXT Dickinson wrote three famous 'Master Letters' to an unidentified man, addressing him with intense, submissive devotion. Scholars still debate whether this was a real person, God, or a literary construct.

This poem's final couplet—'Eternity, I'm coming, Sir— / Master, I've seen that face before'—echoes that Master correspondence. She addresses death/God with the same formal, almost erotic submission. The recognition ('seen that face before') suggests this isn't a first encounter but a reunion.

The childhood prayer she fumbles at connects to this. She's regressing and advancing simultaneously—losing her childhood (becoming a 'bride') but also returning to the prayer language of submission she learned as a girl. The 'Master' could be God, could be Death personified, could be the patriarchal authority she both resisted and obsessed over.

Notice she doesn't say she's *afraid*. The tone is almost eager—'I'm coming, Sir'—as if death is a long-awaited consummation. The wedding metaphor works because both marriage and death meant, for a 19th-century woman, the end of autonomous selfhood.