Whose cheek is this?

Emily Dickinson wrote “Whose cheek is this?” in the 1850s in a letter to “Sue,” most likely referring to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. The letter containing the poem also contained a picture of a bird and the remnants of a piece of thread that could have secured a flower to the letter itself. The poem is a lyric (meaning that it relates the personal thoughts and feelings of the speaker) consisting of two stanzas of five lines each. It features a slight, alternating rhyme scheme and a meter that shifts between iambic dimeter, iambic trimeter, and iambic tetrameter. Dickinson also employs assonance and consonance and heavily utilizes personification to conflate the metaphor of the flower with that of a girl/woman. Writing in a patriarchal context, amidst the Transcendental movement of American Literature, and within the growing racialized turmoil of the looming Civil War, Dickinson portrays themes of the necessity of companionship, the inevitability of death, and the cyclical nature of life.

Poet Biography

Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was the second child of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Dickinson’s father, Edward, was a treasurer at Amherst College (which his own father, Dickinson’s grandfather, helped to found) and would later serve a term in Congress. Dickinson’s mother was from an elite family in Monson, Massachusetts and was a housewife. Dickinson’s two other siblings were her older brother, William Austin, and her younger sister, Lavinia.

During her early years of education, Dickinson attended Amherst Academy for approximately seven years before she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. However, she only attended the seminary for a year before leaving; the exact reason she left the seminary so soon is unknown. While attending these various institutions, Dickinson was praised for her aptitude in a variety of subjects, from composition to the sciences, and her botany class prompted her to compose an herbarium.

Dickinson’s love of writing emerged during her teenage years, and various inspirations for her work can be traced to this time as well. One of her friends, Benjamin Newton, gave Dickinson a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry. She shared her own early poetry with her friend Henry Vaughn Emmons. She maintained a close group of friends, including Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Emily Fowler, and Susan Gilbert. During these early years, Dickinson also experienced loss and death, such as the death of her cousin Sophia Holland. Religious revivals of the time also made Dickinson question the nature of faith and the soul. Though the rest of Dickinson’s family were largely evangelical Calvinists belonging to Amherst’s First Congregational Church, Dickinson never joined this, or any, institutionalized faith.

One of Dickinson’s closest friends, Susan Gilbert, married Dickinson’s brother in 1856. Susan and William Austin moved into the estate next to the one where Dickinson lived with her parents and sister. It was Gilbert who would introduce Dickinson to another of her poetic inspirations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During her early 20s, Dickinson became reclusive. She didn't leave home often and maintained correspondence with select individuals via letter. From 1855 to 1859, much of Dickinson’s and her sister Lavinia’s time was spent caring for their invalid mother who suffered from an unknown disease.

The years 1858–1865 have been identified by academics as Dickinson's most productive period in terms of textual output. She began piecing together her manuscript collections by writing out copies of her poems on clean paper and sewing them together. During this period of production, Dickinson would write approximately 40 booklets of poetry constituting roughly 800 individual poems. During her lifetime, Dickinson shared her poetry most frequently with her sister-in-law. Only a handful of her poems were published publicly (without Dickinson’s permission), while the greater part of her collection remained private. Dickinson also shared her work with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom she began exchanging work with around April 1862.

Dickinson’s last excursions outside of Amherst occurred between 1864 and 1865 when she traveled to Boston to receive treatment for iritis, a painful eye condition. When she returned home to Amherst, Dickinson rarely left her family’s estate. Towards the end of her life, the last 15 years or so, Dickinson continued to produce around 35 poems a year. Yet, while she continued to write poetry, she no longer bound them into collections. Her father died in 1874, and her mother passed away in 1882. Dickinson took the death of her 8-year-old nephew, Gib, in 1883 especially hard. After this last death, Dickinson fell ill, and she died of a stroke at 55 on May 15, 1886. More contemporary analyses label the cause of Dickinson’s stroke as hypertension. While there are speculations she had amorous relationships and received at least one marriage proposal, Dickinson never married.

After Dickinson's death, Lavinia gathered her sister’s poems; this collection appeared in 1890 as Poems by Emily Dickinson. A family friend named Mabel Loomis Todd assisted in transcribing Dickinson’s poems, while Thomas Wentworth Higginson helped edit the text. However, because the poems were edited to fit standard literary conventions of the time, some of Dickinson’s uniqueness and stylistic idiosyncrasies were lost. A full collection of Dickinson’s work was released in 1955.

Poem Text

Whose cheek is this?

What rosy face

Has lost a blush today?

I found her—"pleiad"—in the woods

And bore her safe away.

Robins, in the tradition

Did cover such with leaves,

But which the cheek—

And which the pall

My scrutiny deceives.

Dickinson, Emily. “Whose cheek is this?.” All Poetry.

Summary

Dickinson’s poem opens with the speaker questioning who they see before them. More specifically, they only reference the cheek but don’t know to whom it belongs. This cheek was once flushed with life but is now pale and void of vivacity. While the speaker refers to the cheek’s owner using the pronoun "her," the object to which the speaker refers could be a flower or a girl. Either way, the speaker notes how this girl/flower is one of a group and has been separated from her companions. The speaker whisks her away from the woods hoping to protect her. Abruptly, the speaker shifts away from the girl/flower to allude to a folktale in which two young children become lost in the woods and die due to the elements. Robins, finding the bodies of the two children, cover them with leaves to give them a proper burial and mourn their passing. This death disorients the speaker, who cannot decide whether what they see before them is indeed a girl/flower or merely the aftereffects of death.