My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close My life closed twice before its close-- It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. A paradox is a statement which contains apparently opposing or incongrous elements which, when read together, turn out to make sense. The first line …showed first 75 words of 2943 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2943 total…now absent from American culture. However, the sixty years that separate the creation of these two poems seems to have provided a degree if sophistication which has made Wallace Stevens’ vision of death at home a vision shared by all of his readers. Both poems have a sense of multiple emotion, but Stevens’ poem is much more realized, the emotions much more original, which in the end makes his much more memorable than Dickinson’s.