Tag: Heaven and Hell

Emily Dickinson’s “So has a Daisy vanished”

The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “So has a Daisy vanished” wonders if the dead Daisy and other departing plant creatures of the field have gone off to be “with God.” 

Introduction and Text of “So has a Daisy vanished”

The speaker of Emily Dickinson’s “So has a Daisy vanished,” who has a keen ability to observe her natural surroundings, has been moved to wonder about the soul of “a Daisy” and many other “slipper[s]” who have given up their physical encasements of beautiful blooms and glorious green stems and simply vanished.  She wonders where they went, as she dramatizes their final days of earthly glory.

So has a Daisy vanished

So has a Daisy vanished
From the fields today –
So tiptoed many a slipper
To Paradise away –

Oozed so in crimson bubbles
Day’s departing tide –
Blooming – tripping – flowing
Are ye then with God?

Commentary on “So has a Daisy vanished”

The speaker in this brief drama wonders if the dead Daisy and other departing plant creatures of the field have gone off to be “with God.”

First Stanza:  A Flower in Heaven

So has a Daisy vanished
From the fields today –
So tiptoed many a slipper
To Paradise away –

The speaker begins with a statement informing her readers and listeners that a lovely flower has gone, disappeared “from the fields today.”  She begins with the conjunctive adverb “so,” seeming to indicate that she is merely taking up a thought that began somewhere else and at an earlier interval.   

Then again employing the telling “so,” the speaker adds that many other flowers have also tripped off to “Paradise.”  Along with the lovely “Daisy,” the other “slipper[s]” have all gone missing, but the speaker suggests that they have metaphorically died and gone to Heaven.  While the “Daisy” has rather generically “vanished,” the others have “tiptoed” off “to Paradise.”

The speaker is playing with the language of loss, which almost always produces a melancholy in the very sensitive hearts of keen observers.  Instead of merely dying, the flowers vanish from the fields and tiptoe away.  

That they all have metaphorically gone on to “Paradise” demonstrates that the faith and courage of the sensitive heart of this deep observer are fully operational.  That the speaker allows that these creatures of nature have gone to Heaven or Paradise shows that she has a firm grasp on the existence of the soul as a permanent life force that plants as well as animals possess. 

This speaker understands that all life is divinely endowed.  The flowers leave behind their physical encasements, but they take their soul encasement and then scurry off to the astral world, from where they will likely return to the Earth or some other planet to continue working out their karma–an eventuality that informs the procedure for the animal kingdom as well.

Second Stanza:  To Be with the Divine Creator

Oozed so in crimson bubbles
Day’s departing tide –
Blooming – tripping – flowing
Are ye then with God?

While the speaker remains aware that plant life force is as eternal as that of the animal kingdom, she is not so sure about where each individual plant goes after its demise.  Thus she wonders if they are “with God.”  

Likely influenced by the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell, the speaker no doubt wonders if plant behavior while on Earth may require a reckoning that leads to Heaven or Hell.  That she asks in the more affirmative mood demonstrates her optimistic sensitivity.

Paramahansa Yogananda has likened life on Earth to vanishing bubbles.  He has explained that many deep thinking philosophers, sages, and poets have realized that the things of this world are like bubbles in the ocean; those individual things such as stars, flowers, animals, and people suddenly appear, experience a life only for a brief period of time, and then they disappear as swiftly as they appeared.

In his poem, “Vanishing Bubbles,” the great yogi dramatizes that brief earthly sojourn of the myriad life forms, as he unearths the solution for those sensitive minds and hearts that grieve after the loss of those individuals whom they had loved and who yet must vanish like bubbles. 

And that solution is the simple knowledge that although the physical encasement of each individual has indeed vanished, the soul of each individual continues to exist; therefore, there is no actual vanishing or death.

The speaker in Dickinson’s poem is suggesting that she is aware of the eternal, everlasting nature of the soul.  After the lovely bloom has been maneuvered into the world on “crimson bubbles,” it will live its brief life, prancing about with the breeze, and then with the “departing tide,” its day will come to an end,  but only for its physical encasement, which it will leave behind.  

The speaker knows that its soul–its life force–will continue, and she wonders if those souls of all those lovely flowers she has been enjoying will then be “with God.”  That she would ask hints that she believes the answer is yes.