Religion In Emily Dickinson

When people think of Emily Dickinson, they think of a white dressed, ghostly woman hidden in the corridors of home, writing poem after poem. They do not think of the actual person Emily was. Emily Dickinson grew up in a rich, social, scholarly environment. She could have chosen many paths that would have led her to a completely different life, but because of circumstances, the social, high energy girl with a sense of humor became isolated by her own choice. Though Emily Dickinson’s depression is romanticized, sickness, social life, and death led her to seclusion and deep poems.

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.

Emily Dickinson is the definition of poetry. Within her poems lies numerous underlying meanings and symbols from her lifetime. When she was just a teenager she left school and became a recluse on her family’s homestead. Where she would begin to write some of the greatest poems in history. It is recorded that she wrote hundreds of little poems on random pieces of paper. Some of her greatest poems were about society during her time period, and they can even relate up to today’s society. Some of her best poems about society are “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant”. Both of these poems contain a lot of similarities. However they differ slightly, in saying that, the other really compliments the other within their deeper meanings. Within each of these poems lies metaphors, personification, and inverted syntax.

Emily Dickinson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" is centralized on the events of death and is spoken through the voice of the dying person. The poem explores both the meaning of life and death through the speaker and the significant incidents at the time of near death that the speaker notices. Many of Dickinson's poems contain a theme of death that searches to find meaning and the ability to cope with the inevitable. This poem is no exception to this traditional Dickinson theme; however its unusual comparisons and language about death set it apart from how one would view a typically tragic event.

In opposition to “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, Dickinson published her work of “I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died”. In this particular piece of literature, the author disbeliefs in an afterlife. In this poem, a woman is lying on bed with her family surrounding her, waiting for the woman to pass away. The woman, however, is anxiously waiting for “…the kings”, meaning an omnipotent being. Finally when the woman dies, her eyes or windows, as referred in the poem, “could not see to see “. When the woman passes away, she couldn’t see any angels or gods as she expected would be there, but instead, she is fluttered into nothingness. She isn’t traveling to an afterlife as she had expected to unlike in the poem of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. The woman finds out that death is a simple end to everything.

Religion, the integrity of faith, and the nature of God are all prominent elements of renowned poet Emily Dickinson’s pieces. By using a small variety of formats, namely short and assertive, with long and flowy on the contrary, Dickinson is able to convey the complexity of the topic at hand, or the gravity of the issue. Dickinson also uses varying diction in order to differentiate how she views potentially controversial subjects; sometimes using ornate vocabulary and other times making blunt statements to do so. Using these tools, Dickinson productively conveys the message that there is a much needed blend between the idea of religion and the facts that science provides.

Milton. Secluded for most of her life, Emily Dickinson was an American poet/writer who had some of the greatest works of poetry. Often her poems were dark and short in length. She wrote over 1,800 poems in her lifetime but most of them was published after her death. Her works are known for nature, love, death, and out of the ordinary rhymes/rhythm. Both of her poems “Before I got my Eye Put Out” and “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” expands upon the metaphors of loss and darkness. In “Before I got my Eye Put Out”, the metaphor being expanded on is sight because it's precious. In “We grow Accustomed to the Dark”, sight is a metaphor of something that is ultimately lost but eventually you begin to pick yourself back up.

Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death” is both a memory and an account of faith. Dickinson was raised in a time where Religion and faith were at the forefront of everyone’s mind. The churches of the time were trying hard to meld traditional religious practices with new theological and scientific ideals. As her family and friends began to join the Church and push for Emily to pursue membership, she resisted and ultimately never joined. However in Emily’s works you can see the struggles she faces with her faith and God. This poem is no different. “Because I could not stop for Death” is in fact proof that even though Dickinson challenged God and religious tone changes throughout her works, she did have faith in some form of immortality.

Emily Dickinson was a poet who used many different devices to develop her poetry, which made her style quite unique. A glance at one of her poems may lead one to believe that she was quite a simple poet, although a closer examination of her verse would uncover the complexity it contains.

Two of Dickinson’s universal techniques are metaphor and the fresh application of language; both techniques result in powerful images, and can be seen in two of her poems that focus on nature themes, “ A Bird came down the Walk” and “narrow Fellow.” She closes the poem, “ A Bird” with a stanza equating flight through the air with movement through water,

In both her poems, “Because I could not stop death” and “I heard a fly buzz”, Emily Dickinson brings to light the subject of death and what happens when coming to terms with death by accepting it. One having a more powerful point of view about the afterlife. Both poems show similarities because they both wanting death to take them both on to the afterlife. Dickinson is trying to send to her audience a greater feel for what may lie ahead in the afterlife with two different moods. Both poems have very different messages on what happens when one is confronted after death. One describes the afterlife as peaceful and civil while the other one disappointing and sad. “Because I could not stop for death” is the more powerful poem of the two. By discussing comparing and contrasting both poems and understanding their meanings, the reader can gain a fuller understanding of the of what lies ahead in the afterlife.

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

The controversy surrounding Emily Dickinson is her odd lifestyle and her tendencies to be somewhat of a recluse. She is sometimes considered abnormal because she does things differently from most others. She spends much of her life dressed in white and withdrawn from much of society. Of course, her peers take this negatively, but what they do not understand is that her being so private is more of a meditation to her, instead of a hiding. She just wants to escape the pressures she feels are normally required of women. She does not want to be a servant to sick and elderly. She feels she has more potential for her mind to grow, and those obligations would just be hindrances to her writing (McQuade 1255). Her childhood and her staying out of society as an adult, along with many other aspects known and not known, influence her poems and the style in which she goes about writing the works. Her techniques of writing are completely different from any other writer, whether prose or poetry. Dickinson composes her phrases by marking them off with a dash, placing a space before and after. This small maneuver places more emphasis on her “impress of the mind in its analysis of experience” (McQuade 1256). Her slant thymes and unique form of expression produces more of an oddness to the audience.