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Emily Dickinson Theme Of Death

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American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate Norman Cousins once said: “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” In other words, this quote means that people within a society are very pessimistic about their daily occurrences with fearing the pain of death. The subject of death, including Emily Dickinson’s own death, occurs throughout her poems and letters. Although some find the preoccupation morbid, hers was not an unusual mindset for a time and place where religious attention focused on being prepared to die and where people died of illness and accident more readily than they do today. Nor was it an unusual concern for a sensitive young woman who lived fifteen years of her youth next door to the town cemetery. Even though many find it strange, Emily Dickinson had a healthy and genuine relationship with death and mortality.
Dickinson dedicated much of her thought on the subjects and themes …show more content…

Death has been mentioned frequently in her poems together with frustration, suffering, pain, sorrow, grief and loneliness. Critics have pointed out that nearly one-third of her poetry is concerned with the theme of death. This preoccupation with death made Dickinson a poet of darkness. This theme begins in her early poetry and continues in her later poetry. She does not represent death in the same manner in all the poems. It is portrayed by her from every possible aspect, as the courtly lover in her poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, a dreadful assassin in “Apparently with No Surprise”, physical corruptor and also as a free agent in nature. It varies in tone from elegiac despair and confident belief. She considers death as a hidden mystery. She says in one of her poems, “Death leaves us homesick, who behind, Expect that it is gone Are ignorant of its concern As if it were not born”

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