Death And Religion Depicted In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

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Emily Dickinson’s poems mostly feature personal and dark topics such as death, pain, funerals, and the distance she seemed to feel from society. Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily writes 1,775 poems from her house during the Civil War when most writers focus on religion. As a talented poet, Dickinson interprets the Civil War “the war between the states” dreadfully and earns the nickname, “The Poet of Dread.” Life in a small New England town in Dickinson's time contained a high mortality rate for young people; as a result, there were frequent death-scenes in homes, and this factor contributed to her preoccupation with death, as well as her withdrawal from the world, her anguish over her lack of romantic love, and her doubts about fulfillment beyond the grave. Dickinson’s poems centering on death and religion can be divided into four categories: those focusing on death as possible extinction, those dramatizing the question of whether the soul survives death, those asserting a firm faith in immortality, and those directly treating God's concern with people's lives and destinies. The very popular "I heard a Fly buzz …show more content…

She is getting ready to guide herself towards death. But the buzzing fly intervenes at the last instant; the phrase "and then" indicates that this is a casual event, as if the ordinary course of life were in no way being interrupted by her death. The fly's "blue buzz!' is one of the most famous pieces of synesthesia in Emily Dickinson's poems. This image represents the fusing of color and sound by the dying person's diminishing senses. The uncertainty of the fly's darting motions parallels her state of mind. Flying between the light and her, it seems to both signal the moment of death and represent the world that she is

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