There's been a Death, in the Opposite House Analysis

We're betting that most of you were raised on Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss. No matter what it is that you hear in childhood, those are the rhythms that will be ingrained in your psyche forever, for b...

In nearly every neighborhood there's the Gladys Kravitz, the snoop, who sees all and knows all. In the small town of this poem, that busybody is our very own speaker. Every detail we get about the...

Where did it happen? Right across the way. When did it happen? Today. Death in the opposite house: pass it on. Everybody else in this poem might be running this way and that, but the speaker and th...

This little ditty reads like a telegraph dispatch from a witness at the frontline, with its starts and stops marked by those famous dashes, the plain facts and their descriptions. At the beginning...

To be honest, Shmoopers, there's not much up with the title because there, um, isn't one. Yep, that's right. No title here, except that people need something to refer to when talking about a specif...

Who would ever think that a poem about observing the signs of death from the safety of one's own house would be written by the famously reclusive, infamously morbid Belle of Amherst? Anybody who's...

There's not much climbing or altitude change involved in this plainspoken poem. In fact, you can plop yourself down on the window seat beside the speaker and see what there is to see and imagine wh...

Rebel, rebel, indeed. Although a woman of profound spirit, Dickinson steadfastly rejected conventional religion: "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling V...

There's nothing spicy here for any Peeping Tom neighbors to see. And we should know; we've been watching the house for hours. A mattress gets thrown out a window, but the only activity it's been us...