Emily Dickinson has always been one of my favorite poets. I love her poems because of the pain and sorrow they contain to which I can easily relate. She often writes of funerals and death. I myself have watched too many friends die and have wondered why God would let this happen. At every funeral, some well meaning mourner would say--,"The Lord called him" or "She's with Jesus now." My gut reaction was always, "Bullshit." Then Emily Dickinson's poem "My Life Closed Twice Before its Close" would come to mind, especially the last two lines--,"Parting is all we know of Heaven and all we need of hell." More than anything I've ever heard those lines summarize the doubts I've had about an afterlife and the pain of those left behind.
My friend Molly Moynahan, recently wrote a novel and titled it Parting is all We Know of Heaven. The book opens with Dickinson's poem in its entirety. It is the story of a young woman whose life is destroyed by grief following her sister's death. I too have been at the point where grief combined with my own stupidity (drugs and alcohol) almost destroyed my life.
My best friend since childhood killed herself by eating 56 valium pills. Her suicide note said that she was too ashamed of herself to face her family anymore. Her parents didn't even bother to come to her funeral. We had to take up a collection in the bar to bury her. Two weeks later another good friend choked to death on his own vomit. His three year old daughter found him the next morning. I was overwhelmed with guilt when I realized I had been drinking with him the night before. To this day when I see his wife and children at the supermarket, I can't look them in the face. Within the next two months I lost three other friends t...
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... we discussed in class the tradition among New England Puritans of looking in the face of the dead and reading their emotions to determine whether or not they were going to heaven. I've thought about this a lot since I've found God and I hope that it isn't true. Everyone I've known has died a horrible death. They were all cut down in the prime of their lives--face down in their own vomit, on the cold, dirty floor of a bathroom, decapitated in a car wreck, in a crowded AIDS ward in a city hospital. None of them had a chance to make their peace with God or with themselves for that matter. I'm sure none of them died looking content or peaceful but terrified and at best surprised. Therefore I would like to believe that hell is all that has gone on here in this life and that after the parting there is a heaven where those who suffered on earth are given a second chance.
Although, Emily Dickinson physically isolated herself from the world she managed to maintain friendships by communicating through correspondence. Ironically, Dickinson’s poetry was collected and published after her death. Dickinson explores life and death in most of her poems by questioning the existence of God. Dickinson applies common human experiences as images to illustrate the connection from the personal level of the human being, to a universal level of faith and God. This can be seen in Dickinson’s Poem (I, 45).
In Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” she uses the structure of her poem and rhetoric as concrete representation of her abstract beliefs about death to comfort and encourage readers into accepting Death when He comes. The underlying theme that can be extracted from this poem is that death is just a new beginning. Dickinson deftly reassures her readers of this with innovative organization and management, life-like rhyme and rhythm, subtle but meaningful use of symbolism, and ironic metaphors.
Dickinson’s Christian education affected her profoundly, and her desire for a human intuitive faith motivates and enlivens her poetry. Yet what she has faith in tends to be left undefined because she assumes that it is unknowable. There are many unknown subjects in her poetry among them: Death and the afterlife, God, nature, artistic and poetic inspiration, one’s own mind, and other human beings.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most popular American poets of all time. Her poetry is seen as intense and passionate. Several of her many poems seem to be devoted to death and sadness. No one seems to know the exact connections between actual events in her life and the poetry that she wrote. The reader can see vivid images of Dickinson's ideas of death in several of her poems. Dickinson's use of imagery and symbolism are apparent in several of her death poems, especially in these three: "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain," "I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died," and "Because I Could Not Stop for Death."
The life led by Emily Dickinson was one secluded from the outside world, but full of color and light within. During her time she was not well known, but as time progressed after her death more and more people took her works into consideration and many of them were published. Dickinson’s life was interesting in its self, but the life her poems held, changed American Literature. Emily Dickinson led a unique life that emotionally attached her to her writing and the people who would read them long after she died.
Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.
Shynn Felarca Mrs. Cox English Honors-Period 5 Due Date: 20 November 2015 Emily Elizabeth Dickinson A while back there were many poems and poets. Like Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, a romantic poet who put many deep meanings behind her poems, even if her poems were all mostly about death. When she was alive she was an unknown poet, but throughout the years she became well known.
For as long as the thought of hell has been around people have speculated how hell really is. I don’t think hell is like the book described it. I think the souls that were rejected from heaven are sent to a place to pay for their judgments in life. But truthfully I do not know or even want to speculate what hell is like. No one does and I hope I’m not one of them to find out.
Emily Dickinson became legendary for her preoccupation with death. All her poems contain stanzas focusing on loss or loneliness, but the most striking ones talk particularly about death, specifically her own death and her own afterlife. Her fascination with the morose gives her poems a rare quality, and gives us insight into a mind we know very little about. What we do know is that Dickinson’s father left her a small amount of money when she was young. This allowed her to spend her time writing and lamenting, instead of seeking out a husband or a profession. Eventually, she limited her outside activities to going to church. In her early twenties, she began prayed and worshipped on her own. This final step to total seclusion clearly fueled her obsession with death, and with investigating the idea of an afterlife. In “Because I could not stop for Death”, Dickinson rides in a carriage with the personification of Death, showing the constant presence of death in her life. Because it has become so familiar, death is no longer a frightening presence, but a comforting companion. Despite this, Dickinson is still not above fear, showing that nothing is static and even the most resolute person is truly sure of anything. This point is further proven in “I heard a Fly buzz”, where a fly disrupts the last moment of Dickinson’s life. The fly is a symbol of death, and of uncertainty, because though it represents something certain—her impending death—it flies around unsure with a “stumbling buzz”. This again illustrates the changing nature of life, and even death. “This World is not Conclusion” is Dickinson’s swan song on the subject of afterlife. She confirms all her previous statements, but in a more r...
Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.
Emily Dickinson had a fascination with death and mortality throughout her life as a writer. She wrote many poems that discussed what it means not only to die, but to be dead. According to personal letters, Dickinson seems to have remained agnostic about the existence of life after death. In a letter written to Mrs. J. G. Holland, Emily implied that the presence of death alone is what makes people feel the need for heaven: “If roses had not faded, and frosts had never come, and one had not fallen here and there whom I could not waken, there were no need of other Heaven than the one below.” (Bianchi 83). Even though she was not particularly religious, she was still drawn to the mystery of the afterlife. Her poetry is often contemplative of the effect or tone that death creates, such as the silence, decay, and feeling of hopelessness. In the poem “I died for beauty,” Dickinson expresses the effect that death has on one's identity and ability to impact the world for his or her ideals.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10th December, 1830, in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. As a young child, she showed a bright intelligence, and was able to create many recognizable writings. Many close friends and relatives in Emily’s life were taken away from her by death. Living a life of simplicity and aloofness, she wrote poetry of great power: questioning the nature of immortality and death. Although her work was influenced by great poets of the time, she published many strong poems herself. Two of Emily Dickinson’s famous poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died”, are both about life’s one few certainties, death, and that is where the similarities end.
Dickinson's poetry is both thought provoking and shocking. This poem communicates many things about Dickinson, such as her cynical outlook on God, and her obsession with death. It is puzzling to me why a young lady such as Emily Dickinson would be so melancholy, since she seemed to have such a good life. Perhaps she just revealed in her poetry that dark side that most people try to keep hidden.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American History, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice.
Throughout Emily Dickinson’s poetry there is a reoccurring theme of death and immortality. The theme of death is further separated into two major categories including the curiosity Dickinson held of the process of dying and the feelings accompanied with it and the reaction to the death of a loved one. Two of Dickinson’s many poems that contain a theme of death include: “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” and “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”