Emily Dickinson

On this long storm the rainbow rose

On this long storm the rainbow rose,
On this late morn the sun;

Listless elephants

Clouds moving slowly across the horizon like tired elephants—the metaphor captures both their massive gray shapes and their exhausted pace after the storm.

The clouds, like listless elephants,
Horizons straggled down.
The birds rose smiling in their nests,

Birds rose smiling

Pathetic fallacy—attributing human emotion to nature. The birds aren't actually smiling; this is how the living perceive the world after a storm.

The gales indeed were done;
Alas!  how heedless were the eyes
On whom the summer shone!
The quiet nonchalance of death
No daybreak can bestir;

Slow archangel's syllables

Resurrection theology—only Gabriel's trumpet at the Last Judgment can wake the dead. 'Slow' because it hasn't come yet, may never come.

The slow archangel's syllables
Must awaken her.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Bait-and-Switch Structure

The first six lines read like a conventional nature poem: storm ends, rainbow appears, sun breaks through, birds sing. Dickinson loads the opening with renewal imagery—everything in the natural world responding to the storm's end. Then line 7 drops "Alas!" and the whole poem inverts.

The phrase "heedless eyes" does double work. Heedless means inattentive, careless—but dead eyes can't heed anything. The summer shines "on" these eyes, not "for" them. The preposition matters: light falls on a corpse the same way it falls on a rock.

This is Dickinson's standard move: use nature's patterns to highlight death's exception. Every living thing responds to the storm's end except one person. The "quiet nonchalance of death" is brilliant—nonchalance suggests casual indifference, but there's nothing casual about death's permanence. It's the ultimate non-participant in nature's cycles.

Why "Slow" Matters

The final image invokes Christian resurrection: the archangel's syllables refers to Gabriel's trumpet announcing Judgment Day (1 Thessalonians 4:16). But Dickinson calls them "slow"—which creates a problem.

Slow can mean two things here: (1) the archangel speaks slowly, deliberately, or (2) the archangel is slow to come, delayed, possibly never arriving. The second reading suggests doubt about resurrection itself. If only Gabriel can wake this person, and Gabriel is slow, then death might be permanent after all.

Dickinson wrote 1,800 poems and avoided publication. She was obsessed with death but skeptical of easy Christian consolation. This poem's structure mirrors that skepticism: eight lines of natural renewal can't touch two lines of death's finality. The storm ends for everyone except the dead.