Emily Dickinson Religion

In the poem “Because I could Not stop for Death”, Emily Dickinson describes death as an experience that she is looking back on. Dickinson uses a variety of elements, such as personification, imagery and irony to get her point across that death is not a dreadful event, but actually a pleasant experience. Although death is often perceived as being depressing and frightening, it should be viewed in a positive way realizing that it is the beginning of eternity.

She viewed conformity as a chain around the neck or enslavement to society. On line 8 of her poem “Much Madness is divinest sense”it says “Demur- You’re straightway dangerous- and handled with a chain” (line 8). This line is saying that people who stand out or cause doubt in a situation are dangerous and are eventually chained or tied up so that they will no longer cause doubt in other people’s minds. People are scared of things that are different and would rather chain them up in the corner than allow them to be different. Richard Wilbur wrote that “Emily Dickinson found that she must refuse to become a professing Christian. (pg. 1131)” This was yet another way that she stood out and did not conform to society. While many people were professing Christians during that time, she chose to worship in a different way. She was not concerned with what others thought, she was more concerned with how she was going to do things and this changed the way she wrote poetry.

Death is a controversial and sensitive subject. When discussing death, several questions come to mind about what happens in our afterlife, such as: where do you go and what do you see? Emily Dickinson is a poet who explores her curiosity of death and the afterlife through her creative writing ability. She displays different views on death by writing two contrasting poems: one of a softer side and another of a more ridged and scary side. When looking at dissimilar observations of death it can be seen how private and special it is; it is also understood that death is inevitable so coping with it can be taken in different ways. Emily Dickinson’s poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died” show both

First, Emily Dickinson’s poetry1 continuously rejected society’s perception of death. As death approaches, the one entering eternity and those nearby are often scared

"Because I could not stop for Death" is one of the most puzzling poems Emily Dickinson wrote. “Scholars who stress these subversive qualities note that this poet appropriated conventional language, images, and themes and twisted them, disrupting their usual meaning.” (Dunlap, 2) In this poem, she describes death in hindsight. She commentates the experience play by play, chronicling her actions and vision from the time he arrived to pick her up in his carriage to her final resting place. In the poem, the impression of death is not portrayed as scary or daunting, but rather more as tranquil and peaceful. In the poem, death took on the image of a person. Through personification, he was portrayed more like a male suitor picking up his companion for a date. Dickinson guided us to believe that the speaker in the poem is talking and describing her journey with death to us from beyond the grave. She leads us to believe that the speaker is ghost-like or a spirit who has accepted her death and content with her boundless eternity. It is not surprising that “Because I could not stop for Death” incites so much controversy in that it presents complex and multi-dimensional concepts of both life and death, both of which are too mysterious to be fully expressed. In “Because I could not stop for Death”, Dickinson does personify both death and Immortality as people, and presents the process of dying as eternal life. However in a bizarre twist, she also personifies life. She brings

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson processes the life leading up to death and eternal life. The speaker is telling the poem many years after death and in eternal life. She explains the journey to immortality, while also facing the problem of sacrifice and willingness to earn it. The poem is succulent in alliteration, imagery, repetition, personification and rhyme. A notable shift in almost all of the poems direction occurs as well. By doing so, Dickinson, a poet in the American Romantics era, sets forward an idea that immortality will appear in the afterlife of an individual who believes so.

The subject of death, including her own was a very prevalent theme in Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. Some may find her preoccupation with death morbid, but this was not unusual for her time period. The mindset during Ms. Dickinson’s time was that of being prepared to die, in the 19th century people died of illness and accidents at an alarming rate, not to mention the Civil War had a high number of casualties, she also lived 15 years of her youth next to a cemetery. Dickinson’s view on death was never one of something to be feared she almost romanized death, in her poem “Because I Could not Stop for Death”, she actually personifies death while narrating from beyond the grave. In the first stanza she states “I could not stop for

Everybody has a different view on religion and its existence. Emily Dickinson, an objective poet acting as a detached observer, describes what she has seen or heard and brings her own reflections on the things she has experienced. Objective poetry is impersonal, which allows readers to be open to different interpretations; it allows the facts to represent themselves and not be impacted by the individual values and predispositions of the poet. Dickinson’s poem, “Prayer is the Little Implement”, exemplifies a true objective piece. Emily asks how someone could reach the heavens when God has “denied” his presence. Because God hides himself from human presence, men “fling” their prayers. They fling their despairs and request into God's ear, on the

Religion: Many biographies reveal Emily Dickinson’s dispute with faith throughout her life. Dickinson’s education piqued her curiosity and helped build her desire to question the ideas of her time, “Her education was strongly influenced by Puritan religious beliefs, but Dickinson did not accept the teachings of the Unitarian church attended by her family and remained agnostic throughout her life. ”(Napierkowski & Ruby). Even as a child, Dickinson doubted the religious beliefs of her time. From a literary criticism that attempts to sort other Emily Dickinson criticism and ideas, What, then, can we say of her attitude toward the orthodox religion of her youth and her time?

Dickinson starts to form the image in her by brining her audience into “The Carriage” which held only “herself and Immortality” (3-4) Dickinson wants to begin to bring her reader into state of mind so they can understand her thinking. As a known recluse she must make an effort to invite her readers into her mind to take them on the journey known as death. She wants to build the image of what she believes death to be, and change how people think of the journey of death. As she continues her journey in the carriage with death, she describes how they “Passed the school/where children played” to “ the setting sun” (9-12) As she continues her ride with death, she continues to set the stage not only for her journey, but for the paradox between herself and the puritan faith on their ideas of death.

A major factor of Emily Dickinson’s style of poetry is the time period in which she lived. Emily Dickinson was alive from 1830 to 1886 (Mackowiak and Batten, 1159), during which the Second Great Awakening, Romanticism, and the United States Civil War took place. When Dickinson was a teenager, the Second Great Awakening took hold, encouraging people to take hold of their religion and practice once more. Thomas Ford discusses this in his book Heaven Beguiles the Tired: Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson, reviewed by Jack Capps. Capps points out that Ford “repeatedly asserts that poetry, for Emily Dickinson, was but a substitute for the religious conversion that would have allayed her fears of death and obviated her poetic utterance” (227). Dickinson did not blindly accept what religion told her to believe about death. Christianity depicts the idea of dying in a peaceful way, then spending the rest of eternity in a mystical place. Instead, Emily Dickinson wanted

Two of Emily Dickinson’s poems, “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” and “Because I could not stop for Death” are both written about life’s stopping point, death. Although the poems are written by the same poet, both poems view death in a different manner. Between the two poems, one views death as having an everlasting life while the other anticipates everlasting life, only to realize it does not exist. While both poems are about death, both poems also illustrate that the outcome of death is a mysterious experience that can only be speculated upon with the anticipation of everlasting life.

Emily Dickinson once said, “Dying is a wild night and a new road.” Some people welcome death with open arms while others cower in fear when confronted in the arms of death. Through the use of ambiguity, metaphors, personification and paradoxes Emily Dickinson still gives readers a sense of vagueness on how she feels about dying. Emily Dickinson inventively expresses the nature of death in the poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)”, “I Heard a fly Buzz—When I Died—(465)“ and “Because I could not stop for Death—(712)”.

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense