Emily Dickinson

Evening

EVENING.
THE cricket sang,

Cricket as director

The cricket doesn't just sing—it "set the sun," as if the insect's evening song controls the cosmos. Dickinson gives agency to the smallest creature.

And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.

Sewing metaphor

"Seam the day upon"—the workmen are literally stitching closed the day like a piece of fabric. The whole poem treats time as something you can handle and finish.

The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do

Twilight personified

Twilight becomes a Victorian caller with "hat in hand," uncertain whether to enter or leave. The formal social ritual mirrors the day's hesitation between staying and going.

With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,—
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,—

Hemispheres at home

The earth's two halves—one in daylight, one in darkness—are "at home" together. Peace comes from this planetary balance, not from conflict resolved.

And so the night became.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

How Evening Arrives

Dickinson reverses the usual power dynamics of nature poetry. The cricket sang / And set the sun—she gives the tiny insect control over the celestial. This isn't pathetic fallacy (nature reflecting human emotion); it's something stranger. She's suggesting that our human perception of events creates their order. We hear the cricket, then notice the sun has set, so in our experience the cricket caused it.

The poem proceeds through a series of personifications that get progressively larger and stranger. First, workmen "seam the day upon"—treating time as fabric they can stitch closed. Then twilight becomes a Victorian social caller, complete with hat, manners, and social uncertainty ("To stay as if, or go"). Finally, "vastness" and "wisdom" arrive as neighbors, and "peace" is compared to hemispheres.

Notice the progression from concrete to abstract. Cricket → workmen → twilight (still visible) → vastness (invisible) → wisdom (conceptual) → peace (emotional). By the end, night hasn't fallen—it has "became," like a transformation or revelation. Dickinson treats evening not as darkness arriving but as the world reorganizing itself into a different state of being.

Dickinson's Domestic Cosmology

CONTEXT Dickinson rarely left her Amherst home after her thirties, but her poems routinely contain the entire universe. She achieves this by treating cosmic events as domestic occurrences and vice versa.

In this poem, the technique is explicit: "A vastness, as a neighbor, came." The infinite becomes the person next door. "Hemispheres at home" domesticates planetary geometry. Even the cricket—a common household pest in 19th-century New England—controls the sun. She's collapsing the distance between her bedroom and the cosmos.

The poem's syntax mirrors this collapsing. Notice how lines 9-12 pile up without main verbs: "A vastness...came" is followed by "A wisdom" and "A peace" that just float there, connected by dashes. The grammar itself becomes uncertain about boundaries—where does one phenomenon end and another begin? This is Dickinson's signature use of the dash to create simultaneity rather than sequence. Night doesn't arrive in stages; all these qualities arrive at once, or rather, they are the night, and the night is them.