EMILY DICKINSON-AND HER POETRY

Emily Dickinson, ‘the Belle of Amherst’ was an American poet and is considered one of the most original of 19th century American poets. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. Throughout her life she seldom left her house and led a secluded life, except for the short time when she attended Amherst Academy and Holyoke Female Seminary, until her death on May 15, 1886 due to Bright’s disease. Emily was an energetic and outgoing woman while attending the Academy and Seminary. It was later, during her midtwenties that she began to grow reclusive.

DICKINSON AND HER POETRY

 Emily Dickinson’s poems have many distinguishable features. The poet reflects her loneliness and the speaker’s of her poems generally live in a state of want. The major themes in her poetry include friends, nature , love and death. Adrienne Rich once said “Dickinson is the American poet whose work consisted

in exploring states of psychic extremity”. Most of her love poems are psychological and autobiographical. Dickinson never married, but reading her poems we understand that she was in love at least one point in her life. She uses the syllogistic method of reasoning to describe the importance of love that she had in her life. She says that love is life, life is eternal and therefore love is eternal.

 “That I shall love always

I argue thee 

That love is life-

 And life hath immortality-” 

The poem “I cannot live without you” is considered the best love poem and the most famous love poem by Dickinson. She pictures the feelings of two lovers who cannot live together, cannot die together, and cannot rise after death together, cannot be judged by God together. All they can do is to maintain the possibility of communication though oceans apart.

“So we must keep apart 

You there, I here, 

With just the door ajar

 That oceans are,

 And prayer 

And that pale sustenance Despair” 

As Dickinson’s life was marked by witnessing a series of deaths, the tragic deaths of those close to her we find death becoming a recurrent theme in most of her lyrics. She maintains an ambivalent attitude towards death; death being a terror and death as a relief through which she can move towards immortality. Death is personified in many poems. In the poem “Because I could not stop for Death” death is personified as a gentle, courteous and polite man who takes her on a ride in a carriage.

“Because I could not stop for death

 He kindly stopped for me” 

She travels along different ways and sees different things all along this journey. 

“We passed the fields of Gazing Grain

 We passed the setting sun”

In the end she speaks of ‘eternity’, death leads us to an eternal world. 

She speaks of God and heaven in her religious poems.

 She craves for a day when she will be able to meet God.

 “I went to heaven

‘T was a small town,

 …. 

Beautiful as pictures 

No man drew”

 The poem “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” is told by a dead woman who is still speaking and hearing things. Lying on her death bed, surrounded by her family, she claims “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died”. She is irritated by the presence of the buzz which distracts the attention of the kith and kin surrounding her. In this poem death is seen as an extension of life, death as the beginning of an eternal life. Pain and suffering run all through Dickinson’s poems. She speaks about the two aspects of pain, its timelessness and its irresistible dominance.

 “Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect 

When it began, or if there was 

A time when it was not” 

Most of her lyrics, though on the surface level seem to be mere short moral sayings have deep underlying meaning beneath. She writes aphoristically by compressing a great deal of meaning into a very small number of words. Many of her poems’ allusions come from her education in the Bible, classical mythology and Shakespeare. Dickinson did not give titles to her poems and often the first line of the poem is used as the title. She wrote short lines, preferring to be concise in her images and references and the poems did not have more than six stanzas. The rhythm in most of her poems is called the common meter or ballad meter. Both types of meter consist of a quatrain with the first and third lines having four iambic feet and the second and fourth lines having three iambic feet. She had a complete disregard for the rules of grammar and sentence

structure as a result of which she is said to anticipate the way modern poets use language. Her compressed use of language often becomes incomprehensible; the language instead of communicating confuses us.