Emily Dickinson

Good night! which put the candle out?

GOOD night! which put the candle out?

jealous zephyr

A zephyr is a gentle west wind. Calling it 'jealous' personifies death as something petty—not grand or terrible, just spiteful.

A jealous zephyr, not a doubt.
Ah! friend, you little knew
How long at that celestial wick

celestial wick

The candle becomes a cosmic object, its wick tended by angels. Dickinson scales a human life up to heavenly proportions.

The angels labored diligent;
Extinguished, now, for you!
It might have been the lighthouse spark
Some sailor, rowing in the dark,

importuned to see

To importune means to beg persistently. The sailor desperately needed this light—someone's life was someone else's navigation.

Had importuned to see!
It might have been the waning lamp
That lit the drummer from the camp
To purer reveille!

purer reveille

Reveille is the military wake-up call. 'Purer' suggests death as a better awakening than the drummer's earthly one—heaven's morning bugle.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Death as Extinguished Light

Dickinson wrote this around 1860, during the first wave of Civil War deaths. The poem reads like a meditation on someone recently deceased—the candle 'extinguished, now, for you' addresses a specific 'friend' who didn't know their own value.

The structure builds through hypotheticals. First stanza: what happened (candle out). Second and third stanzas: what *might have been*—the life could have guided a sailor, could have led a soldier home. The repeated 'It might have been' creates accumulating loss. We're not just mourning one death, but all the unmade futures.

Notice the military imagery in the final stanza. The 'drummer from the camp' references the drummer boys who led soldiers into battle and beat reveille each morning. Many were teenagers. Dickinson transforms the boy's death into a promotion: he's gone to a 'purer reveille,' a better morning call. It's consolation, but the word 'purer' also indicts the earthly reveille—the one that woke boys to march toward death.

The Mathematics of Value

The poem's logic is economic: angels labored diligent at this life, investing celestial effort, and now all that work is lost. The word 'labored' makes life-maintenance into hard work, not miracle. Heaven put in overtime on this candle.

Dickinson often wrote about death as waste or bad accounting. Here she calculates what the world lost: one lighthouse spark, one guiding lamp. The conditional tense ('might have been') keeps the losses theoretical but specific. She's not saying this person *was* important—she's saying they *could have been* to someone drowning in darkness, someone needing to find their way home.

The 'you' in line 6 is deliberately ambiguous—it could mean 'extinguished for your benefit' (you're better off dead) or 'extinguished to your detriment' (you lost out). Dickinson leaves both readings open. Either way, someone who 'little knew' their own worth is gone, and the world is darker for sailors and soldiers still rowing, still marching.