The first few lines of "I—Years—had been—from Home" conjure up an uneasy atmosphere. The poem's speaker, visiting a former "Home" after long "Years" away, doesn't seem to feel this return is a triumphant one. Rather, they freeze on the threshold, apparently frightened, not "dar[ing]" to enter the place they once knew.
The phrasing and pacing of the first lines reveal just how anxious the speaker feels as they stand in front of the house's ominous "Door." Listen to the caesurae here:
I—|| Years—|| had been—|| from Home—
And now—|| before the Door—
Dickinson's poetry is often filled with strong mid-line dashes—but even for her, this is a lot! All those breaks make the speaker's voice sound halting and shivery, as if the speaker is shaking in their boots.
The firm iambic meter, meanwhile (lines built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm) sounds like a pounding heart, or like the knock at the door the speaker just can't manage. Listen to that first line again:
I—Years || —had been || —from Home—
The caesurae here break right where the metrical feet do, emphasizing the boom-BOOM, boom-BOOM, boom-BOOM sound of a racing pulse.
All this scene-setting leaves the reader with any number of questions. Why was the speaker away from home for so long? What brought them back? How have they managed to get right up to their old home's very "Door" before being struck with this kind of terror? And what's so terrifying about their former home, after all?
The poem answers none of these questions but the last. Listen to the way that enjambments shape the speaker's tone as the speaker describes exactly what they fear:
I dared not open—lest a face
I never saw before
Stare vacant into mine—
After the poem's first two halting, end-stopped lines, this rush of enjambments makes it sound as if the speaker is suddenly overflowing with anxiety—so much so that their stream of words carries them all the way into the next stanza.
And the thing they fear sounds like something right out of a ghost story. The speaker is terrified that, if they knock on their own old door, they'll be answered by a stranger, someone whose "vacant," uncomprehending expression reveals that they have no idea who the speaker is.
Even worse than that, though, is the thought that this stranger might be someone who should know who the speaker is. Being away from "Home" for "Years," after all, shouldn't be enough to make everyone who stayed at home forget you.
The speaker, then, seems to be scared of two possibilities at once:
- The idea that their loved ones might have vanished and been replaced by strangers;
- Or the idea that the speaker and their loved ones might not recognize each other anymore.
In short, the great terror of returning home after a long absence is the idea that home might have changed beyond recognition.
A subtle repetition underscores that idea. The speaker uses the word "before" twice in the first stanza: once to mean "in front of" ("before the Door") and once to mean "in the past" ("I never saw before"). This poem will be all about standing before what came before: confronting the past after everything has changed.