This poem is like the Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden in many ways. In the line where Dickinson says, “We sauntered from the Door--” it’s like she is describing Adam and Eve gleefully leaving behind their house, the only thing they’ve ever known. When Dickinson writes, “Eden is that old-fashioned House we dwell in every day…” she’s saying that you’ve taken for granted what you are accustomed to seeing every day. In Adam and Eve’s case, they didn’t know anything else except for Eden and they didn’t know that once they left it would be gone forever. They were “unconscious of returning,” and once they left the garden they were forever filled with knowledge of the world. Their ignorance was erased once they sauntered out the door into the world of unforgiving reality. They were ignorant of the perfection of their surroundings and they see the imperfections of the world when they leave. In the last stanza, Dickinson is saying that when they look back on the day they left the garden, they will no longer understand the happiness they felt in Eden because they now have the knowledge of the world. Once they gained their knowledge, they could never go back to their world of blissful ignorance.
In eight months’ time I will be sauntering out my own Door on my way to my biggest adventure yet: college. My departure for college is parallel to Adam and Eve’s departure from the Garden of Eden because we were all ignorant of the future on our way out the door. I have no idea what college life will be like; I can’t even begin to guess. We all have to leave our “old-fashioned House”, a place that provided warmth, security, and comfort all the days of our lives and journey out into the unknown. When Adam and Eve later reflect on Eden, they would not see it in the same light as they had before because of all of the new things they had witnessed in the outside world. Eden was the only thing they had ever known, and now that they have something to compare it to it won’t be the paradise they once saw it as. The same will happen to me once I leave my own personal Eden- my home. I’ve never lived anywhere else except for the home I’ve grown up in and moving away from home to attend college will be a major change. When I return home, there may be a chance that I will no longer see my home as the sacred haven I’ve grown accustomed to seeing it as.
In the last few weeks I’ve had the most unusual dreams. I thought that they had no meaning. But when I shared them with my mom, she told me that they hide a deeper underlying meaning that my subconscious was trying to depict. In one of these dreams, my mom was standing in our kitchen and then all of a sudden she grew giant swan wings and flew away through an open window. She flew straight out and never looked back. This dream was particularly hard on me and I woke up crying that night. In the next dream that I had about a week or so later, I dreamed that I came home from school to see a realtor sitting at my dining room table taking to my parents. My parents had promptly decided to sell our house so that they could live out their dream of living in the Canadian outback. Our house sold the next day and we moved into a hotel while we planned our move to Canada. When I told my mom about these dreams she laughed and told me it was my subconscious telling me about my apprehensions about my upcoming departure from home. This made a lot of sense to me. I’m absolutely terrified about leaving home. I don’t adjust well to new surroundings or situations at all, and I’m petrified about leaving the only security I’ve ever known to venture out into the unknowns of the world.
I’m most afraid that when I return I won’t feel the same homey feeling that my house gives me, because I would have made another place my home. I’m also afraid that my town will look and feel different to me when I return; almost foreign. But mostly I’m afraid that I will see my friends differently because I would have been exposed to so many different people. I could possibly like these new people more. This is what I am most afraid of, because my friends are such a large part of who I am as a person and I don’t want that part of me to change just because I’ve moved to a different place and met different people. I won’t know any of this until it happens and I truly hope that my view of the things that have meant so much to me in my life will continue to look and feel the same when I come home. However, once I know I can never un-know, so only time will tell what my future holds.
