Emily Dickinson

Funny to be a Century

Century as person

Dickinson personifies a century—likely the 19th century itself. The pronoun 'he' suggests she's imagining time as a masculine figure with agency and secrets.

FUNNY to be a Century
And see the people going by,
I should die of the oddity,

Die of oddity

Classic Dickinson hyperbole. She claims the strangeness of witnessing 100 years would kill her—but she's more volatile than time itself.

Staid = serious

'Staid' means settled, serious, unemotional. She's contrasting her excitable nature with the century's grave discretion.

But then I'm not so
Staid as he.

Staid = serious

'Staid' means settled, serious, unemotional. She's contrasting her excitable nature with the century's grave discretion.

Secrets of history

What does a century know that we don't? All the private motives, hidden causes, unrecorded truths behind public events.

He keeps his secrets safely, very—
Were he to tell, extremely sorry
This bashful globe of ours

Bashful globe

The Earth itself would be embarrassed if the century revealed what really happened. 'Dainty of publicity' = squeamish about exposure.

Bashful globe

The Earth itself would be embarrassed if the century revealed what really happened. 'Dainty of publicity' = squeamish about exposure.

Would be,
So dainty of publicity!

Bashful globe

The Earth itself would be embarrassed if the century revealed what really happened. 'Dainty of publicity' = squeamish about exposure.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Century Knows What We Don't

Dickinson wrote this around 1861-1862, just past the century's midpoint. The 19th century had already witnessed: the French Revolution's aftermath, Napoleon's wars, the Industrial Revolution, multiple revolutions of 1848, and—most pressingly for Dickinson—the American Civil War beginning in 1861. When she imagines being a century, she's imagining the perspective of someone who knows how all these upheavals connect, who sees the private motives behind public history.

The poem's central joke is that time is more discreet than she is. Dickinson, famously reclusive and private in life, claims she couldn't keep secrets the way a century does. If she witnessed 100 years of human behavior, she'd 'die of the oddity'—the strangeness would overwhelm her. But the century stays 'staid' (serious, settled, emotionally flat). It watches everything and tells nothing.

The 'bashful globe' line reveals what those secrets might be: the Earth itself would be mortified if the century spoke. What would embarrass the entire world? Perhaps the gap between public virtue and private vice. Perhaps how much of history is accident and pettiness rather than grand design. The century is 'safely' keeping secrets that would humiliate us all—and Dickinson finds this both funny and a little terrifying.

Why Repeat the Whole Poem?

The complete repetition is unusual even for Dickinson, who often repeated refrains. This isn't a refrain—it's the entire poem twice. Why?

One possibility: she's mimicking how centuries repeat themselves. The same patterns of human behavior, the same mistakes, the same secrets accumulating again and again. The second iteration isn't development—it's recurrence.

Another reading: the repetition performs the century's discretion. The poem tells us the same thing twice but reveals nothing new, just as the century watches decade after decade but never explains what it sees. We get the same ten lines again, and we're no closer to knowing what the century knows. The form enacts the withholding.