Genesis inversion
Eden's forbidden fruit made humans mortal. Dickinson flips it—the fruit represents heaven itself, making desire the forbidden thing.
Conditional logic
The syntax matters: 'Provided it do hopeless hang' means heaven only counts as heaven if it's unreachable. Attainability would destroy its value.
Spatial recession
Three nested barriers—hill, then house behind hill, then Paradise behind house. Each 'behind' pushes desire further away.
Reading Notes
The Economics of Desire
Dickinson treats heaven as a scarcity problem. The poem's central paradox appears in lines 3-4: heaven must be 'hopeless' to qualify as heaven. If the apple were reachable, it would cease to be the apple she wants. This isn't theology—it's psychology.
The word 'interdicted' (line 6) does legal work. It means 'forbidden by authority,' importing courtroom language into spiritual longing. Dickinson often wrote about desire as a kind of property law, where prohibition creates value. Compare this to her line elsewhere: 'Water, is taught by thirst.'
Notice what's absent: God, prayer, salvation, any Christian path to heaven. Instead she gives us 'cruising cloud' (line 5)—a moving target that guarantees failure. The poem catalogs unreachable things (cloud color, forbidden ground, hidden houses) as if building evidence for a case about the nature of wanting itself.
Dickinson's Seclusion
CONTEXT By her thirties, Dickinson rarely left her family's property in Amherst, Massachusetts. She dressed in white, corresponded through letters, and declined to publish. Her withdrawal wasn't hermitage—it was curation of distance.
Read the poem's geography as autobiography: 'The house behind' (line 7) could be any neighbor's house in Amherst. She's not describing cosmic realms; she's describing the view from her window. The 'interdicted ground' might be someone else's yard—literally forbidden because it belongs to another family, metaphorically forbidden because crossing it would mean social contact.
The final line's exclamation—'There Paradise is found!'—sounds like discovery, but it's really definition. She's not finding Paradise; she's deciding that inaccessible things count as Paradise. This is how voluntary isolation sustains itself: by treating distance as achievement rather than loss.