Emily Dickinson Essay Research Paper Death in

Emily Dickinson Essay, Research Paper

Death in Emily Dickinson s Poetry

While Emily Dickinson s life is well documented, it is important that readers understand how significant events in her life impacted her views on death, sanity, and nature. Born in Amherst, MA in 1830, she was encouraged at a young age to pursue academics, which she excelled in. She attended Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts for one year, however, she withdrew shortly after for unknown reasons. The most significant years of her life are those from 1850-1862, which marked a prolific period in her writing as well as the development of her writing style.

An important aspect in the development of Dickinson s writing and her themes is her personal identification with the deaths of important people around her. Dickinson was deeply affected by the loss of young, close friends such as Sophia Holland, Leonard Humphrey, and Benjamin Newton; all of whom died before she reached maturity. Their deaths along with the death of her mother were a constant reminder, especially to nineteenth century Americans and Emily Dickinson, of the fragility of life. While the death of friends played an important role in her obsession about dying, her environment also contributed to her curiosity. The Dickinson s orchard adjoined a burial ground and funerals in procession were quite visible, therefore making death a constant aspect of daily life. It was not the familiarity with death that inspired Dickinson to write, it was her fear of what the afterlife would bring. She proclaimed that her motivation to write about death was further based on emotional responses which included feelings of guilt, fear of abandonment, and projection of anger.

After her years at Mount Holyoke, Dickinson left Massachusetts only on several occasions, and towards her middle age, she never left the comfort of her home. This period of isolation allowed Dickinson to work undisturbed on some of her best poetry. Many critics believe that her poems of sanity represented her mental state and perhaps indicate a shaking of the foundations of her psychic being. The lack of interaction with the outside world served as an impeding precursor to her nervous breakdown.

Among Dickinson s written works on the subjects of death, sanity, and nature, five poems deserve special attention: Because I could not stop for Death, There is a Funeral in my Brain, I heard a fly buzz when I Died, To die- takes just a little while, and I reason, Earth is short. Since Dickinson decided not to title her poems, they are often labeled by the first line of the first stanza or by the number they appear in the published volume of her work.

Dickinson s writing style and method, and the manner in which she approaches subjects in her poetry, are very distinct. Dickinson was very organized in her approach to writing poetry, often using worksheet drafts to assist her in the writing process. The end results of Dickinson s composition process are poems that are reflective and precise. In a further examination of her poetry specific characteristics arise through her distinct use of diction, meter, rhyme, and the dash. These figures of speech allow her to create poems that were intimate, universal, and unique.

Diction is an important aspect of Dickinson s poetry, and as aforementioned, she went through great lengths to ensure that she selected precise words for each single line. However, as a result of her abundant vocabulary, many of her poems have various implications as well as associations. In her poem, I felt a funeral in my Brain, her diction is very important in creating a parallel scene between the funeral procession and the speaker s own procession of insanity. Words like bell in the fourth stanza create the imagery of a bell tolling in the advance of a funeral march. The use of I instead of we or another pronoun, allows the writer to create an intimate first person portrayal of the struggle and subsequent, suffering of the speaker. Images of a funeral procession reappear in the work; however, it is her diction that ironically brings life to these images of death. Her collective use of images and diction in I felt a funeral in my Brain, provides an overpowering vision of not only the funeral procession, but also the procession of the mind to instability.

Through Dickinson s work, the written word possesses its own life separate from that of the speaker. She regarded words as individual entities with a growth and immortality of their own. She derived her extensive vocabulary from everywhere; her own intelligence, standard speech of her time, the concrete and the abstract, the words of the young people and the theological words of the orthodox preachers.

Dickinson s rhyme pattern utilized four types of rhyme patterns which were not often used by her contemporaries: identical rhymes, vowel rhythms, imperfect rhymes, and suspended rhyme. The freedom in her poetry is strengthened by her inability to be constrained by specific types of rhyme or metric patterns.

Her variation on rhyme and meter are evident in Because I could not stop for Death, where she uses imperfect rhyme. The lack of concise or perfect rhyme allows the reader to spend more time on the individual words rather than speed through them. The more meaning a reader finds in the words of a poem, the more they can identify the recurring symbols within its dialogue.