Emily Dickinson’s Poem It Was Not Death Essay

This provokes the readers' psyche of a lonesome, fragile individual, standing isolated at the end of an dark, treacherous road. This imagery is successfully used to illustrate a portrait of Dickinson, or even the individual reading the piece themselves, as they’re yearning for their new life, which right now is filled with darkness and sorrow. The poem is comprised of five stanzas, each consisting of four lines. The monotonous nature of the poem is nothing gleaming or eye catching, and this is purposely done for the conspicuous fact that sometimes, precious values and things you love are vaporized. With the abandonment of something important, the world does not stop revolving around you and seemingly mold itself for you. It will continue to revolve in the same way it always has for four and half billion years, but now only seeming to be filled with darkness, difficulty and

For example, in “After great pain…” Dickinson says, in the second stanza exactly how life feels as it continues for the mourner:

departure as the prime reasons for the sorrowful tone Dickinson used in her poems in the

The last two lines of the poem are a timid reflection on what might happen “Had I the Art to stun myself/ With Bolts—of Melody!” (23-24). The idea that creation is a power that can get loose and injure even the creator illuminates why in this poem the artist positions herself firmly as a mere spectator. In these first two poems, we meet a Dickinson who is not entirely familiar to us—even though we are accustomed to her strong desire for privacy, these poems can be startling in the way they reveal the intensity of Dickinson’s fears. She is, after all, shrinking from what is dearest to her—nature, one of her favorite subjects, becomes a harsh judge, and poetry, her favored medium of communication, can suddenly render the reader “impotent” and the writer “stun[ned]” (19, 23). The extremity of her positions in shrinking from the small and beautiful things she loves creates the sense that this is just the beginning of a journey by leaving so much room for change.

During the second half of the poem , Dickinson, using personification once more, expresses the feeling that “I say it just/ Begins to live/ That day” (4-6). This time, instead of explaining a word with death,

This poem is written in ballad form which is odd because one would think of a ballad and think a love story or an author gushing on about nature not an allegory about personified Death. Dickinson both unites and contrasts love/courtship with death, experimenting with both reader’s expectations and the poetic convention dictating specific poem form. This is why Dickinson is widely hailed because of her unconventional writing methods.

Dickinson uses a resilient voice to express to the readers her anger towards humanity, due to their lack of clarity, individualism and sovereignty. You can sense her despondency towards the system and how people just accept something illogical, solely based on the fact that it is accepted by the majority .While reading further into the poem, Dickinson states people who are crazy are actually sane and those who claim to be sane are actually crazy. The poem continues in that direction, informing that the vast majority of people, only see the madness in the world, convicting all those who disagree against the mainstream. If you have the audacity to be a nonconformist and sustain your individuality, regardless of how you are viewed or judged. With clarity, you will see the world for what it really

Have you ever felt like you were lost in the world? Well in Dickinson’s poem, she describes that losing an eye is like being lost in the world. Not only this, but she describes both the literal and figurative meaning of losing an eye. In this story, she explains losing an eye is hard at first, but with grit and will, you can make it through. Likewise, she explains being alone in this world is hard at first but if you’re willing to take risks, you can make new friends and live a good life. Overall, she draws comparisons between memories and reality, and here’s how!

The poem contains five quatrains with the rhyme scheme ACBC with the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyming. In the first stanza Dickinson begins by saying “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain” she does this to point out it really feels like there is a funeral service going on in her brain. The mourners keep walking inside the speaker's brain until it feels like sense is breaking through. That is, until she begins to experience the funeral as a physical sensation – as something she can perceive with her five senses. By repeating

I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain In this poem, the speaker/author going mad. She talks about how a funeral going on in her head, which you can interpret that a part of her is dying on the inside, and that a part of her is unconscious. In the first paragraph of the poem, Dickinson is trying to figure out what death is and why a part of her is dying or going mad. For example, in the first and second lines in the first paragraph, she comes out and says that she feels a funeral in her brain and mourners are gathering around.

In the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson uses symbolism to convey some sort of mental funeral that the speaker is experiencing. The funeral image that Dickinson depicts in the first line of the poem: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” does not literally represent a funeral, but it is used to symbolism a mental breakdown and agony that the speaker is going through. By using this symbolism, the speaker is imagining the death of old ways of thought. Dickinson writes that when the funeral service was “like a Drum—“ (Dickinson 43) and that it “Kept beating—beating—till I thought My Mind was going numb—“ (43), leaving readers believing that the speaker is going mad. By depicting this image, Dickinson reveals that with the death of old thought; there is some sort of numbness or pain that is necessary to “progress to a better state” (Goldfarb 2). By repeating the beating sound two times, along with the rhyming sequence in the previous lines of the poem, Dickinson is stressing the numbness and the importance of it.

Once the eyes begin to glaze over, physical death could be pending and death of emotional control could also be setting in. Dickinson is interested in this death of control, so the reader is reminded of Dickinson’s contrasting views on agony. Dickinson enjoys the fact that people cannot fake the reactions to anguish; therefore their reaction must be true. Because of her isolated lifestyle and the wonderment she had for things both natural and spiritual, she appreciated something that was a known truth. It’s intriguing to read such an unconventional view on watching others suffer.

We are immediately made aware at the beginning of the poem that there is nothing out of place about this day except that they lost a family member. Dickinson was letting it be known that while the rest of the world continued as usual, they sat there in a room watching one of their suffering family members take her last breath. Death makes life different somehow. As Dickinson states, “-this to Us Made Nature Different” (lines 3,4), she tells us that when her family member died it changed them. This poem shows the raw emotion of sadness and the effect of grief overtaken her in just 6 short stanzas.

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