Essay Emily Dickinsons Use of Nature

One of the prevalent themes of Emily’s work is death. Since she wrote about her inner world and troubles, death as a theme could not be avoided. Emily Dickinson had to face the losing friends to death. Several deaths of family members, including her mother, father and a nephew helped contribute to the theme in her poetry. These events affected her health but she found a way to cope with the idea of death with her poetry. She developed an attitude towards death, seeing it as a transition from mortality to immortality. She accepted its inevitability and tried to make peace with the idea itself. This kind of comprehension was something Emily needed in order to cope with the loss of her loved ones who had been her only support and company in her isolated lifestyle. The theme of death is shown in the poem I picked for the research paper. In the poem called “How Far Is It To Heaven”, by Emily Dickinson it again deals with death but heaven and hell is included. This poem has only a few lines but it gets straight to the point and the theme of the poem hits you right in the face. One example is clear from the first two lines where it asks “How Far Is It To Heaven?” (Line 1) and “As far as Death this way” (Line 2). The poem is so simple but portrays a powerful message to the reader. Another huge theme of

The poem “Before I got my eye put out” portrays the idea that most living things are unable to recognize the beauty of sight until they lose it. The speaker reflects the true beauty of the world when she says “The Motions of the Dipping Birds-/ The Morning’s Amber Road-/ For mine-/ to look at when I liked-/ The News would strike me dead-” (14-17). This demonstrates the image of nature that the speaker “looks at” but actually “sees” the beauty of sight. Dickinson conveys the idea that one’s vision from

One of the prevalent themes of Emily’s work is death. Since she wrote about her inner world and troubles, death as a theme could not be avoided. Emily Dickinson had to face the losing friends to death. Several deaths of family members, including her mother, father and a nephew helped contribute to the theme in her poetry. These events affected her health but she found a way to cope with the idea of death with her poetry. She developed an attitude towards death, seeing it as a transition from mortality to immortality. She accepted its inevitability and tried to make

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.

This passage implies Dickinson as a morbid observer witnessing a routine frightens bird decapitates a worm for a meal. It is significantly a nature drama.

Finally in the final stanza of the poem, Dickinson remembers the horses in which she was being taken away when she died. The horses seem to be taking her into Eternity, basically an afterlife.

Within the poem, Dickinson writes, "The simple news that Nature told, With tender majesty." Dickinson is using personification because nature cannot literally speak to her and tell her the basic truths about life. In this poem, Dickinson communicates with the world, though the message from Nature. She views nature as her friend, which stresses to the reader that nature is personified. Dickinson uses slant rhyme within the poem, she also uses

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.

Nature has an undefinable meaning as the theme is utilised in literature, and it has been a topic of reflection within the Romanticists since the beginning of the era. Romanticism and nature and inextricably linked ideas. Poets; Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman wrote during the romantic era, and both drew heavily from aspects of nature in their work. Nature can be paralleled against several things, including humanity and the idea of life and death. The contrast between the natural world and the artificial world, and what this means for society, is also strongly eluded to in Dickinson and Whitman’s poems. Each poet uses nature as the backbone to their poetry in several instances. Dickinson’s, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”, (Dickinson, 19) and “My Life Has Stood A Loaded Gun”, (Dickinson, 69) are strong examples of this. Whitman’s, “Song of Myself”, (Whitman, 29) and, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, (Whitman, 255) are also poems that show the connection between nature and romanticism. Poets, Dickinson and Whitman engage with romanticism in a creative and constructive manner through the utilisation of the natural world.

Dickinson’s letter is to the world, which ignores her, tells of Nature’s message about her works, and asks the world to judge them kindly. However, since this most likely was not actually written for people to read, it is Emily’s own acceptance of her work, written only for herself. This emotional plea with herself helps the readers see her dedication and passion for her writing. This letter can also be seen as Dickinson’s acceptance of rejection, when a few of her poems were submitted for publishing, and denied. She was confident enough to know that her poetry was incredible, and that men involved in publishing were too closed minded to allow her work to be printed. Dickinson is creatively able to place two different meanings into one poem, depending on how the reader choices to perceive it. By intertwining the idea of nature into her poem, while refereeing to it as something else, her abstract meanings can be taken at different levels.

Harold Bloom, an American literary critic, summarized Dickinson’s ability as a writer in one sentence: “Her unique transport, her Sublime, is founded upon her unnaming of all our certitudes into so many blanks; it gives her, and her authentic readers, another way to see, almost into the dark” (Grabner, Hagenbuchle, and Miller 192). Dickinson’s inspiration was her own doubt in her faith and existence. Through that she found meaning in her life and discovered the immortality of the soul. She became comfortable with the idea of death because to her it wasn’t an ending; it was the beginning. Her life as recluse only put more focus on the existential problems she tried to answer. After her death her poems grew in popularity, and her message was spread all over the world. She inspires many people like the composers who made art songs and the weekly churchgoer that finds strength in her poems. No matter what, the effect Emily Dickinson has had on us as readers, as people, as skeptics, as religion seekers will always be with us. Her influence is

Emily Dickinson establishes in the first stanza of her poem that she understands the idea that someone she cares about may leave her. She begins her poem by saying, “It did not surprise [her]” (37) when it was time for the bird to leave its nest. Dickinson is attempting to agree with the natural idea that this bird will eventually leave her one day. It is inevitable that a child will one day move on from his or her parents bringing about a certain pain to those that love him or her. However, this does not dismiss the pain she feels from her love leaving. The three dashes she uses in the first two lines lengthen the time for the reader to get to the revelation that Dickinson’s love

This poem conjures images of a solemn ceremony in which the soul reigns superior by shutting out everyone, including the emperor, similar to the shutting out of everyone that Dickinson did. In one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “I heard a Fly buzz,” the theme of death is presented as well as a symptomatic characteristic of bi-polar disorder. The poem itself epitomizes her preoccupation with death and the macabre and also shows how the small, normally ignorable sound of a fly buzzing becomes the only thing heard, she magnifies this sound in a situation when it seems that everything else is much more important, but this inability to drown out extraneous noises is typical of someone suffering from manic-depression. The form of this poem employs all of Dickinson’s formal patterns: trimeter and tetrameter iambic lines, her specific use of the dash to interrupt the meter of the poem, and it is in ABCB rhyme scheme.

In this poem Dickinson makes the reader aware that death is an everyday event but can change the lives of the ones that are the closest to that person. When death becomes a reality the family seems to realize that the smaller things are very important, “We noticed the smaller things- Things overlooked before/ By this great light upon our Minds Italicized-as ‘twere” (lines 5,6,7,8). The things that everyday people do not slow down to see, become significant when the realization comes that there is someone that will not get to enjoy those same small things.