"These are the days when Birds come back" by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, in her poem, “These are the days when Birds come back”, comments on the uncertainty of religion and implies that religion can be neither proven nor disproven.  In the footnotes in Perrine’s, it says the time of year represented in the poem is an Indian summer. An Indian summer is a sudden heat wave that occurs in the fall. Even the time of year depicted in the poem is representative of uncertainty as even when it is supposed to be cold, there can be a sudden, unexpected shift in temperature. I think the heat wave represents any unexpected or difficult time in life.  In the first stanza, “ a Bird or two” is fooled by the Indian summer and think that summer has returned.  Birds symbolize a higher connection to God which is represented by the fact they in flight they are physically closer to God. The fact that the word Bird is capitalized indicates that these birds are connected to God in some way and may be angels. The Birds looking back could be a metaphor for religious people who in an unexpected time of trouble, don’t look to God, but “take a backward look” or look for solutions from other sources.  The reason why religious people look back is because God can be neither proven nor disproven and thus they can’t be sure if God is the solution to their problems.

In the next stanza, “The skies resume the old”, as in they return to normal when the trouble has passed. However this transition is described as “sophistries of June” because the troubles appear to have passed for misleading reasons. The religious people think that the reason that their troubles have passed is because of God, but this can’t be proven. This image is depicted in the last line of the stanza: the portrayal of “a blue and gold mistake” is representative of a summer day where the sky is clear and the sun is shining.

Even though the Indian summer fooled the birds, it is a “fraud that cannot cheat the Bee”.  In the footnotes of Perrine’s, it says that the bee is “an allusion to one of the apocryphal tales of Solomon, who distinguished between real and artificial flowers by pitting a bee in the room; the bee of course flew to the real”. According to this description, the bee represents the ability to distinguish between the real and the artificial. Dickinson says that she was “almost” fooled which “induces” or influences her beliefs.  So unlike the other followers, she wasn’t fooled to blindly believe in God, but appears to take a more neutral stance on religion. He may or may not exist.

Dickinson describes death as the moment when one discovers whether or not God exists. The “altered air” represents a kind of enlightenment.  “Oh Last Communion in the Haze” is when you become enlightened to the existence or nonexistence to God as it is when the “haze” is lifted. When we die we “partake” in “bread” and “wine”. This represents the body of Christ, and in eating, we are becoming closer to God in the afterlife after we die. However, bread and wine are also associated with the death of Christ; so possibly upon us dying and not going to the afterlife, we will realize that God doesn’t existence and our idea of God dies. Either way we won’t be sure of the existence of God until we die, but at that point it is too late.