Death in the Poems of Emily Dickinson

Introduction

Death imagery permeates so many of Emily Dickinson's poems that it seems as if she is making a statement that it is never too far from human consciousness. Death is inevitable and close to all—so close that one poem's speaker claims to feel a funeral in her brain and mourners treading through her mind, with the beating drum of the service and the creaking of a coffin being carried off for burial ("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"). A review of the contents of first lines confirms the extent of this striking readiness to confront and interrogate death, yielding an unsettling array of voices that seem to be speaking from both inside and beyond the grave itself with startling familiarity with the afterlife: "I died for Beauty" utters one voice; "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died" testifies another; "I went to Heaven" says another voice, as if likening the passage of death with all the banality of an account of making a routine journey. In "Because I could not stop for Death," Death is personified as a kindly gentleman passing by the living in a carriage, stopping to pick up the passenger, who narrates the poem with all the civility of a friendly neighbor. This paper discusses death in the poems of Emily Dickinson such as “Because I could not stop for Death” and “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun”.

Discussion

The theme of death informs the highly individual structure of Dickinson's poems. Their often stark brevity and heavily condensed lines make them reminiscent of epitaphs from a headstone, particularly acute in poems that convey a sense of tribute and memorial ("Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," "The Butterfly in honored Dust," "Departed—to the Judgement"). Dickinson's idiosyncratic dashed lines stage endless verbal deaths as ideas and statements come quickly and then expire, each like a last gasp of breath, leaving tenuous connections between lines at times. Dashes inside the line halt other progressions, such as the separation of subjects from verbs evocative of the body departing from the activity of life, as in "And Firmaments—row / Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender" ("Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," 1861 version). (Shaw,123-125)

Regardless of religious belief, Dickinson posits that death ultimately leads to oblivion. Calvinists may consider themselves as meek members of the Resurrection, she contends in "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," but grand events on earth and grand expectations of heaven (punned on in the line "Grand go the years") eventually dissipate as human existence timidly evaporates like soundless dots in snow. Often, death is announced by a rush of cacophonic sound followed by silence, or a rush of quick activity followed by stillness, as life gives way to nothingness. So the heavens, or "firmaments," are said to "row" like thunderclaps before the erasure of life into soundlessness, signaled in the poem by the strong use of sound plays involving s and d in the last two lines, as if all other sounds had been drained from the poem, ...