Death And Emily Dickinson
Dipankar Dutta
Barry L. Hall
English 1102
March 17, 2011
Death and afterlife
Emily Dickinson became a legendary figure in english literature through her preoccupation of death. Her poetic work contains different description of death which encompass emotional responses to body’s or soul’s journey to eternity. Dickinson’s poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, “I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died”, “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”, and “This World is not Conclusion” all acknowledge, and showed us the importance of one of life’s indisputable phenomenon's, death. Her work showed interest in mortality, and in these poems her interest in exploring the death is evident. Her curiosity led ...
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ideas about afterlife. Dickinson begins by telling that she, and Death are passengers in a carriage. This personification in the poem is meant to show the constant presence of the idea of death in Dickinson’s life, in particular in everyone’s life (Spencer, 95). The first stanza further exemplifies her disillusioned feelings about death. Death kindly stopped for her from her otherwise comfortable life to afterlife. This particular scene presents to us that death has stopped being a frightening, ominous presence, and has now become a comforting, constant presence (Spencer, 95).
Dickinson further proves her points by glancing out the window at young children, glowing rain, and setting sun in the poem. As life goes on outside, she is trapped inside the carriage -her solitude with death, yet she is calm. The scenes she sees out of her secluded window represent the stages of life. Children playing at recess represents the innocence of childhood, gazing grain represents maturing into ...
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an internal death rather than a physical one - the descent of a human being into insanity. She presents the poem in such a way that we can assume Dickinson is talking about her own death, particularly relating towards everyone’s mental situation against death. Even though the process in the poem is described as real funeral, all the events are parallel to what seems her emotional death (Chen, 39). Initially, her mind becomes numb, and she hears insignificant sounds until a bell starts to sound. Afterwards, a feeling of solitude, and silence floods her. Finally, she feels as if she were in a boat where a plank breaks, she falls down and hits the world. This shows Dickinson’s belief to ...
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"Death And Emily Dickinson." Essayworld.com. April 16, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Death-And-Emily-Dickinson/98067.
"Death And Emily Dickinson." Essayworld.com. April 16, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Death-And-Emily-Dickinson/98067.
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