Emily Dickinson’s Imagery and Symbolic Creations

Some of the poems Emily Dickinson wrote, usually offered many different views of death that involve physical and emotional responses of the soul and body’s journey through nothingness, madness and even eternity. The greatness in her poems comes from the use of literary devices to give meaning to death and the different interpretations of the journey through death. Although Dickinson presents contradicting thoughts sometimes, it is clear that she believes that there are many types of deaths in a human being’s life. This paper compares and contrasts the theme of death in Dickinson’s three poems titled “I heard a fly buzz”, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “After great pain a Formal Feeling Comes”.

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

The emotion of desire cannot be predicted; it seems to reveal itself in moments where one would least expect it. In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan Frome meets a girl, Mattie, whom he lusts over, but his desire brings about his destruction in an ironic an unsettling end. Emily Dickinson’s poem “405” symbolically parallels Ethan Frome’s sudden change in his life and addresses the ultimate ruination of the Frome household at the end of the book.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson is one of the best poets in America. She is known for her uncommon way of writing poetry. There was a great deal of problems going on in her life. She spent mostly her entire life living in her home and only left unless she needed to do so. Unlike other poets, she did not have any order to her writings. She just wrote what she was feeling. Her work was anonymously published and later became known after her death.

“Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson shows contradiction by showing that Death is something that we should look forward to instead of being afraid of. Dickinson uses personification by describing death as a nice person. “ Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” The first two lines state that she could not stop for death meaning that the she didn't have a choice about when she was to die, but while death is a kind person, the speaker is okay with dying. Death is driving her in a carriage, showing her a wonderful school whilst the children are playing at recess, and passing field “ Grazing Grain”, showing her wonderful things about life.

Emily Dickinson lived a large period of her life isolated from the outside world, surrounded by her close family and friends. It is apparent that with most of her spare time, she wrote poems and letters. Dickinson’s poems were heavily influenced by the gothic movement in the 19th century of America, and her fascination with nature that is exposed through her continuous theme of nature being the source of joy or pain in your life. Both Dickinson’s curiosity about nature, and the gothic movement, influenced the recurring theme in her poems, which is displayed in the analysis of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”.

One literary element she often used in her poetry is imagery which are words that are visually descriptive or figurative language. By using imagery Dickinson made readers imagine how death is like for her, she also creates tension to describe how intense that moment was. “I could not see to see (line 20)”. would be classified as imagery because it gives readers an idea about her emotions at that exact moment. Another literary element is mood. The mood is something Dickinson focuses on, and tries to make clear. Depressing would count as the mood, because she says certain distressing things about how she feels toward the subject of death. One last example of a literary element Dickinson used in her poem is simile. A simile is when you compare two things using the words “like” or “as”. The line “The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air (lines 2-3)” would count as a simile because she is comparing two alike things, death and air. She’s describing how silent she thinks death really is, maybe even peaceful.

Lyrical poetry is often used for the poet to express their emotions and tend to be written in a first-person perspective as a result. Because Dickinson never wrote in hopes of her poems being seen by the public, her poems are theorized to be a reflection of her thoughts. This is strengthened by poem 788 (709), “Publication – is the Auction”, where she deems it arrogant to publish when poems come from God. She says that “Thought belong to Him who gave it” (Dickson, “Publication – is the Auction”, 1) and it is not the right of the poets to sell that knowledge. Therefore, it’s clear that she is against publishing and this norm to conform to what society wants. As a result, it’s only reasonable to believe that her unpublished poems are a reflection of her thoughts. However, it is unknown as to what those thoughts were, due to the vagueness of her poems. She never outright explains what they mean and any answers that the poem may give, it just raises more questions. In 476 (712), “Because I could not stop for Death”, an explanation is never given as to what Death was a metaphor for and why she found it necessary to refer to what she passed by in the

Emily Dickinson is one of the most influential poets of all time, and has a unique way of using literal imagery to paint a picture in the readers mind. The best poets are those that excel at using their words to create clear, concrete images and intrigue their reader. Dickinson began writing poetry around the year 1855, and prospered for another 10 years. Some of her most famous poems include “I Taste a liquor Never Brewed”, “Success is Counted Sweetest”, and “Wild nights – Wild Nights!”, all of which have influenced many aspiring writers to become poets, and show her true colors as a poet. Among her works of poetry, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, is one that resembles the frequent patterns of Dickinson’s style of

Sometimes her views are very romantic, but other times they are intimidating and a little eerie. Many people agree that, “[Dickinson’s] poems’ greatness comes from the elaborate use of literary techniques to give shape to death, and the ambiguity of meaning that allows different interpretations of these journeys”

I still find the periodic capitalization confusing. I can't make sense of why some words are capitalized and others aren't or if there is even purpose behind all of it (although I'm sure there is). These same elements of the poem are the very ones that I didn't include in my analysis, as I set them aside after being unable to determine their meanings. My argument could be debated on the basis that maybe Dickinson is not presenting us readers with questions at the, but with a choice. Instead of drawing parallels to humanity and its inability to choose whether it stays on Time's stream, she might just be calling out humanity and its foibles, the questions being posed to encourage change and not to just state inevitability. (Though I doubt that

     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.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1836) is one of the greatest poets in American literature. Although she spent most of her life working in relative anonymity, her status rose sharply following her death and the subsequent publishing of much of her surviving work. Two of Dickinson’s most well-known poems are “Because I could not stop for Death—" and “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died”. I say known as because Dickinson never actually gave her poems proper titles. For this reason, the first lines of her poems have come to be used as a distinguishing reference. This paper will briefly analyze both poems in an attempt to both compare and measure their relative literary merits.

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