March 27, 2025
“The saddest noise, the sweetest noise” is considered one of Emily Dickinson’s saddest poems because, in it, the beauty of hearing the melodious sweet songs of birds becomes something sorrowful … because of grief. They are no longer sweet. They become sad because they remind us of our lost loved ones, who at one time delighted in the birdsong that characterizes spring.
One critic wrote, “The poem suggests that, while grief is agonizing, it’s also bittersweet: a painful longing for the beloved dead can feel like a precious thread of connection to the people one has lost….Deep in mourning, the speaker thus feels as if birdsong (and the memories it inspires) can stab them through the heart ‘as quickly as a spear.’”
Nevertheless, the singing birds revive memories of those we have loved and lost. Dickinson suggests that this torment of grief leaves her stranded somewhere on a “frontier” between living and dying.
What Dickinson describes in her short poem is known as “reawakened grief,” when a memory, an anniversary, a situation, a song or a birthday resurrects the grief within us weeks, months or sometimes years later.
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise
By Emily Dickinson
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows,—
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close.
Between the March and April line—
That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.
It makes us think of all the dead
That sauntered with us here,
By separation’s sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.
It makes us think of what we had,
And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.
An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.
Hear “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,” https://youtu.be/32wz2N_UckA.
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