unsuspended suns
Suns that never set—an eternal summer where daylight doesn't end. She's imagining a place without winter's darkness.
freezing fancy
The imagination itself gets cold. Even the act of imagining warmth can't actually warm you.
Not obviated of degree
The cold can't be removed by temperature (degree) or by moving south (latitude). There's no escape through ordinary means.
Reading Notes
Why the Repetition?
The entire poem repeats itself—all eight lines appear twice. This isn't a printer's error; it's Dickinson's manuscript. The repetition enacts the poem's meaning: imagining summer doesn't actually end winter, so you're stuck cycling through the same cold reality.
Notice how the second stanza doesn't progress or resolve anything. You're reading the exact same words, just as the speaker is stuck in the exact same winter no matter how many times she conjures up warmth. The form is the freezing.
Palliate means to ease symptoms without curing. Medicine palliates pain. Imagination palliates winter—it makes it slightly more bearable but changes nothing fundamental. The cold remains "not obviated," not removed.
Dickinson's Amherst Winters
CONTEXT Dickinson lived her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where winters were brutal and isolating. By the 1860s (when she likely wrote this), she rarely left her house, making winter even more confining.
The poem's precision about geography matters: degree (temperature) and latitude (distance from the equator) are the two scientific ways to measure and escape cold. She's saying neither works. You can't turn up the heat, and you can't move south, because this isn't really about weather.
The "fictitious country" is any imagined escape—summer, warmth, elsewhere. But notice: conjecturing that place actually "gives poignancy to Winter." Imagining escape makes the trap worse. The fancy is "freezing" because it fails, and you're left knowing both the cold and the impossibility of leaving it.