American Poet Emily Dickinson

Many people deal with the death of a loved one in many different ways. American poet Emily Dickinson wrote poetry to deal with the death of her loved ones, along with the company of her religion. Dickinson wrote a variety of poetry dealing with nature, god, death, illness, beauty, suffering and survival. In Dickinson’s poem “After Great Pain” she expresses a theme of death through many different aspects like religion.
In Dickinson’s poem she writes in a free forum form creating a three stanza poem with 13 lines. Within in her poem “After Great Pain” the rhyme scheme is very loose being ABCC in the first stanza rhyming “bore” and “before. Then in the second stanza the scheme being DEFGG, when “grown” and “stone” are rhymed together. Then in the third stanza the scheme continuing as the first two with IJKK with the rhyming words being “snow” and “go”. In all three stanzas there is a basic outline, with making the last word in the last two lines rhyme. In addition Dickinson’s poem includes an extended metaphor and also two similes. The second stanza of Dickinson’s poem is the extended metaphor, which explains the ways one would act during the time of a loved one’s death:
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, Or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
(Dickinson 762). In Dickinson’s poem the aspect of religion is mentioned within the first stanza. Dickinson tries to represent an image of Jesus in his tomb through the simile “The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;” (Dickinson 762). A different simile that is in Dickinson’s poem is in the second stanza last line when she writes “A Quartz contentment, like a stone –” (Dickinson 762). A source of imagery in the poe...

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...se of loss – like John Donne did in his poem “Death, Be Not Proud” – yet become content the fact that your loved one has died and that they are now in a better place.
Not everyone deals with the death of a loved one the same, but all can empathize with one another. American poet Emily Dickinson shows how she deals with the death of a loved one through her poetry. Dickinson shows the reader that it is okay to go through the five stages of grief when death occurs, but she also explains to the reader that the entire process may be mechanical. The poem “After Great Pain” gives a deepening insight to the human condition through the eyes of Dickinson; that even through death we must learn to become content and just… let go.

Works Cited

Roberts, Edgar V., and Robert Zweig. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. 5
Compact ed. Boston: Longman, 2012. Print.