Hi everyone
This is my essay for my American poetry class. I got good reviews on it, and I think I did a good job, but I really want to improve my writing and analytical skills. So if you have any expertise, suggestions or remarks, be generous.
Emily Dickinson had a rather interesting relationship with death itself, and she acknowledged this throughout her life, that she was haunted by the ‘menace of death’.Her poetry has several accounts of her experiencing funerals and death takes on different forms and faces to communicate with her. This alludes to the establishment of a bond of finding solace and companionship with death.
One might suggest that it was the aversion she felt towards the futile existence of real life, that led her to crave death. For, she did make a constant effort to not experience a full life, or lead an existence like the others around her. She spent her life rarely leaving her room, communicating through closed doors, and she didn’t even her own fathers funeral down stairs. She never married, and only wore white. She lived not living a life of the common woman of that time.
She was indeed a prolific writer who expressed herself unlike anyone else in poetry, but even her poems were a well-kept secret, discovered after her death by her sister. It is also important knowing that her room had a clear vision of a graveyard – and that her family had taken work as caretakers for funerals.
By this outline, one can easily see why the interest in death would develop, as it was all around her.
But death is not ugly,sad, terrifying or distasteful for her. in her narrations and poems, Dickinson is someone who is not a stranger to the face of death and death is often personified as someone she interacts with. She also experiences in full vision her own funeral without a peep of fear, regret or unease and even her descriptions of death are not filled with typical colors of black, purple , green or images of grit but all images come with easy emotions.
One may analyse that because her life was absent of catalysts that engaged her interest. She found activity and stimulation in these thoughts of dying.
“Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me “
Death with its many faces is sometimes a friendly companion, a devil-like fly and also a lover. This could be an indication to the repressed feelings within her, as she could not physically digest the reality of those commitments in real life, she decided to have them in her imagination.
It is interesting for death to be her lover, because according to the psychoanalytical theory the desire not to die and to reproduce are what form a persons basic moving factors in all humans, but there is obviously an inversion of this concept here. She is attached to the desire of dying and in it finds the place to create life. Maybe her poems are one of those creations of her love for death.
There is obviously no denial of death in her poems, as she bluntly mentions it. What one might suggest is that the constant occurrence of death might be an act of ‘sublimation’. Sublimation is a defense mechanism in which bad memories and feelings are made uplifting and beautiful in order to ease the pain of those memories. So her ordeal with death in her poetry is a way of dealing with the death of loved ones – a kind of therapy to ride her heart and mind of trauma.
“I could not see to see”
Compared with writers on the same topic, the death of women, or death in general her poems are very sensual, active and through the vivid and watching eyes of the dying soul.
Edgar Allen Poe would often write about the death of his wife, and in his poems, would mention her death body, which in a way objectified her. And the tragedy in his poems does not follow the death of his wife, but follows his loss and depression of the loss of her to him, and everything that he felt and saw.
And if one sees that through the waiting days of John Keats, one finds a sad man, waiting like a caged animal to meet death as something that he knows is coming, and there is no hope for him. So for Keats there is often that denial or exclusion of the body of death, and a focus on the beauty of what is felt, and an obsession of wanting to freeze time and be immortal through poetry and art.
“Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:
No god, no demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell.
Then to my human heart I turn at once-
Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;
Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain!”
All of which is not there in Emily Dickinson’s words, who is comfortable and at ease with the grim reaper. Her ‘voyeurism’ transcends the simple plot of dying, that one might say that because she an intellectual ahead of her time, she knew her thoughts would not be accepted in her polite, puritanical society. She therefore exiled herself for her own safety.
And this becomes apparent in her poems ‘ I heard a fly buzz’, in which she is aware of the eyes watching her and how a small fly has blocked her vision. The fly is a symbol for the devil, because the people around her would believe she belonged to hell. The devil is often called the lord of the flies and this fly denies her clear vision.
Vision, was something of great importance to her. The eyes were a mirroring symbol for people, death is never watching her, death is becoming to her. In death she found her muse, lover,friend, foe and a canvas to express herself and everything inside her mind.
Further reading.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson
https://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/Dickinson.html
Maheen's Muse 