Emily Dickinson

Playmates

PLAYMATES.

industrious angels

The oxymoron matters—angels are usually ethereal beings, but Dickinson gives them work schedules and recess breaks, making heaven weirdly bureaucratic.

God permits industrious angels
Afternoons to play.
I met one,—forgot my school-mates,

forgot my school-mates

The dash creates a dramatic pause before the abandonment. She doesn't just prefer the angel—she completely erases her human friends from memory.

All, for him, straightway.
God calls home the angels promptly
At the setting sun;

How dreary marbles

Marbles was a common children's game in 1860s New England. The shift from heavenly "Crown" (likely a royal game) to earthly marbles shows the permanent downgrade after transcendent experience.

I missed mine. How dreary marbles,
After playing Crown!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Childhood Frame

Dickinson uses playground vocabulary to describe mystical experience—a typical move for her. The poem reads like a child's complaint about recess ending, but "playing Crown" suggests something far grander than tag. Crown games involved one player as royalty; here it's likely the angel itself who represents the crown, the ultimate playmate.

The school-mates/marbles pairing grounds this in Dickinson's Amherst girlhood, but the angel encounter follows her adult pattern of describing ecstatic moments (poetic inspiration, religious experience, erotic attraction—she rarely distinguishes) as brief visitations. The "Afternoons to play" detail is oddly specific: these moments come in the middle of the day, not at mystical midnight.

"God calls home the angels promptly / At the setting sun" treats the divine like a strict parent enforcing curfew. The comedy is deliberate—Dickinson often wrote about God as an unreasonable authority figure. But the final line's "How dreary marbles" isn't funny at all. Once you've played with angels, human games are ruined forever.

What Gets Lost

The real devastation is in "forgot my school-mates, / All, for him, straightway." Not "ignored" or "left behind"—forgot. The angel doesn't just outrank human friends; it erases them completely. That "All" on its own, followed by the comma, emphasizes total abandonment.

Dickinson knew this experience personally. After her early twenties, she gradually withdrew from Amherst social life, stopped attending church, rarely left her house. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems that almost no one saw. The angel in this poem could be poetry itself—the demanding art that made ordinary life feel "dreary" by comparison.

The poem's final image is a child alone with marbles, unable to enjoy them. "I missed mine" carries double meaning: she missed her chance (the angel left) and she feels the absence (she misses him). There's no resolution, no lesson learned. Just the permanent knowledge that you've experienced something better than what's available now.