as imperceptibly as grief

• 'as imperceptibly as grief'


  title repeated, emphasising how grief surrounds her
• 'summer lapsed away'


  emphasises the cyclical nature of grief and how grief is so important to her
• 'to seem like perfidy'


  half rhyme shows how she stops when a death happens
• 'twilight long begun'


  grief overtaking her happiness
• 'nature spending time with herself'


  personification of nature as a woman, possibly a direct reference to Dickinson only relying on herself
• 'morning foreign shone'


  new possibility of returning grief
• 'without a wing or a keel'


  ornithological imagery, wing and keel are what keep the bird together, their absence suggests she is broken
• 'summer made her light escape'


  summer escaped, contrasting lapsed away, connotations of feeling of the depression lifting
• 'into the beautiful'


  poem ends on her still grieving, showing how grief is an emotion that never goes away, time just allows people to live with it