The Old Fashioned House
Once tasked to relate it to the story of First Man, it doesn't take much detective work to figure out the allegory within Dickinson's poem for Eve and Adam's departure from Eden. The two of them "saunter" away from the offered paradise of the garden (which is the "old-fashioned house") in the ignorance of their disobedience against God. Only once they commit the act and reject the rules, they come into a new form of self-awareness. Now the bliss of ignorance of Good and Evil is gone, only to be replaced by shame and sorrow. Even as they stand their among the trees of Eden, the garden is lost to them. The poem tells the story of people leaving and old-fashioned house that they had lived in all their lives, sauntering from the door smugly and unconscious of the fact that they would ever return. Dickinson uses the words old-fashioned specifically to show how their dwelling place is an ancient home f...