Emily Dickenson Essay, Research Paper
The concept of death to some is a sad incident. For Emily Dickenson it was the only way to escape her feelings of hurt, loss and lonliness. And based on her religous beliefs, Emily found in spirituaul death the transfer to the perfect world so she could retrieve her lover, liberty, and happiness. She represented that in emphatically self-consience romantic idioms. The following poems: ?My Life Closed Twice?, ?Because I Could not Stop for Death?, ?Preceddence?, ?Ressurection?, ?What if I Shall Not Wait, illustrate Emily?s metaphoric ability and mannerism, and her use of meter as a perfect poetic art.
?Because I Could not Stop for Death? is one of the few poems that contains imagery, for e.g. children represent innocence, grain demonstrates the cold vitality of life, and finnaly the discription of the corrupted house could describe the empty and corrupted life of her own. As shown in the poem ?My Life Closed Twice? death took away both of her lovers, so she felt hopeless, and thinking thst immortality could bring her a third lover, was meaningless, so death was her only solution to escape to heaven so she could be reunited with lost lovers.
In the poem ?Because I Could not Stop for Death?, Emily?s lonely life made her kill time by writing. So the coming of death released her shacles and gave her a tastye of liberty and freedom for e.g. ?We slowly drove he knew no haste
And I hap put away
My labor and my lesser too.
for his civility.?
As John* Crowe says ?It is a single sustained metaphore all of it analouge or ?vehicle? as we call it nowadays, though the charachter called death in the vehicle would have born the same name in the real situation of tenor. Death?s victim now is the shy spinister, so he presents himself as a decent civil funtianary making a call upon a lady to take her for a drive?
The same idea is represented in ?What if I Shall Not Wait? but with a slight diffrence, the difffrence here is that she could not take her life anymore so she did not want to wait for death to release her hands, that she created for herself so she goes and escapes from her life to the world of freedom.
However in ?Precedence? and ?Resserection? Emily shows clearly her love and devotion to god, Emily thinks G-d is her love and being limited to a human being and living in a materialistic world is a big obstacle because she can?t reach G-d. Of her physical nature, she chose spiritual death to transfer her to the spiritual world that is ruled by the royal king called G-d. A perfect example from ? Precedence? is: ?These fleshless lovers met in A heaven gaze A heaven of heavens the privelege of one another?
Even the best selection of Emily Dickenson?s poems suffer from lack of imagery, as most critics agree, but on the other hand her present imagery is not clear due to her extra imagination, which sinks into her finest. Also her lack of mannerisms gave the reader an unclear picture of her imagery.
As in ?Because I Could not Stop for Death?, she mentioned the word children, in all her poetry the word children represents innocence, and sponaneaus actions which is totally opposite of her way of thinking, that is based on a deep thinking before thew attempt of doing any action. Also Austis Warner emphasize the same idea saying that although Emily Dickenson had a free way way of thinking she was not sponanteaus in her actions and in her imagination. She wanted to build her new personality, one who is similar to the personality of child naturally spontanmeaus.
Also in ?Because I Could not Stop for Death?,she emphasized the feild of gazing grain. And Allan Tate praised her poems in the highest terms. He appears almost to praise it for its defect.
The sharp gazing before grain into natur a kind of cold vitality of which quantitave richness
Bibliography
Emily Dickenson
A Collection of Critical Essay
Edited By richard B. Sewall
c. 1963 By Prentice Hall Inc.
Englewood Cliffs N.J.
*John Crowe Ranson
Written in \ on page 88
*1 Austis Warner
taken from \ page 101
*2 Allan Tate