If you were coming in the fall

The poem opens with a simile comparing how the speaker will brush aside summer as a housewife brushes away a fly. The contrast between the enormity of summer and the insignificance of a fly adds immediate weight, intrigue, and complexity to the poem, and it hooks the reader with the imaginative, tangible, and imagistic comparison.

Dickinson also uses metaphor when the speaker imagines months as a yarn-like substance that can be mound into balls and the uncertainty of time to the goblin bee. These metaphors work well because she is taking a non-tangible thing like time and using physical images to help the reader feel this unknowable thing. By utilizing concrete metaphors to paint a picture for the reader, Dickinson communicates intangible feelings with physical sensation. This adds relatability to her thoughts, making her emotions much easier to feel and understand than if she simply spoke about them literally.

One subtle use of repetition in this poem is at the beginning of each stanza. Dickinson repeats the word “If” at the beginning of every stanza until the last one. While not an immediately obvious detail, once the final stanza comes in, this repetition adds another dimension of doubt to the poem.