Emily Dickinson used death as the theme for several of her poems. Dickinson spent a great portion of her life in seclusion. Despite the fact that others worried themselves with normal daily activities, Emily was content to imprison herself to her house, her garden, and her poetry. Due to her uncommon lifestyle, Dickinson was considered abnormal and was never valued as the great poet she is now acknowledged as today. Living life as an outcast, her poems are written from a standpoint that the reader is not used to seeing in common culture. Dickinson’s poems offer a creative and refreshingly different perspective on death and its effects on others. Dickinson combines creative diction with stunning imagery to create amazingly powerful poems. In most of Dickinson’s poems, death is often personified, and is also assigned to personalities far different from the traditional horror movie roles. Three of Emily Dickinson’s poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” “I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died” and “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” are all about one of life’s few certainties: death. Each of these poems looks at death in a different way.
In the poem, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Dickinson tells a tale of a woman who is being taken away by Death. This is the reader’s first indication that Dickinson believes in afterlife. In most religions, where there is a grim reaper, this body will deliver a person’s soul to another place, usually a heaven or a hell.
In the poem, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died -”, Emily Dickinson prominently describes the mental distraction posed by extraneous details at even the most essential moments – even at the moment of death. The poem then becomes even weirder and more chilling by transforming the tiny, normally disregarded fly into the figure of death itself. In this poem the speaker says, “The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air - / Between the Heaves of Storm –” (lines 2-4). Here the room is still, but this stillness resembles the interval between the surging of a storm. Dickinson uses a simile to compare the air in the room with the feeling of the air during a break in a storm. The storm is emotional and personal and the reader knows that more is about to come. The old saying is, “There is a peace before the storm.”
In the poem “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” Dickinson explores the workings of the human mind under stress and attempts to repeat the stages of a mental breakdown through the overall metaphor of a funeral. A metaphor that Dickinson uses in this poem is that the mind cannot go numb because minds are not physical objects.
Emily Dickinson had an exceptional ability to skillfully transform death into ingenious and highly thoughtful pieces of literature. Dickinson’s poems show new ways of looking at death and its effects on people. Through creative phrasing paired with graphic imagery and sometimes shocking viewpoints, Dickenson captures the reader’s imaginations with her continuing works. Dickinson’s poems have been a help in understanding life in general. With every word read new beliefs are formed that will stay with the reader and these beliefs undoubtedly will be passed on to others until their origin is long since forgotten and people will begin to accept them as the truth. These poems allow the readers to look back on their own lives with new insight and will help to make better decisions and observations in the future. Death is a fact of life and looking at it through someone else’s eyes can help to better cope with death when it comes.
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