An Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's Some Keep The Sabbath Going To Church

Known for donning a white linen dress and rarely leaving her bedroom, the poet Emily Dickinson’s peculiarity her community to shun her. Rather than adapt to society’s demands, Dickinson embraced her isolation and wrote often of the liberty she discovered in her reclusivity. Choosing a unique spiritual practice of seclusion with God, Emily Dickinson rebelled against the accepted means of worship in her country and era. Specifically in her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”, Dickinson explores religion as she practices: unrestrained and alone, surrounded by nature. Through the use of rhyme scheme, juxtaposition, and alliteration in this poem, Dickinson describes her spiritual freedom as unconfined to the laws or walls of a church. Unlike most of Dickinson’s poems, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” possesses true rhyme, …show more content…
She opens this poem with, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church- I keep it, staying at Home” (Dickinson). The thematic differences between the two capitalized nouns “Church” and “Home” are central to the poem’s meaning. Church, as a public building of brick reserved for Christian services, opposes Dickinson’s Home, which revolves around privacy and nature. Home has a personal connotation, being where the narrator lives and practices religion, while as the Church is where “some keep the Sabbath”, it loses its intimacy. Furthermore, Dickinson compares tenses to differentiate her spirituality from others’ in writing, “So instead of getting to Heaven, at last- I’m going, all along” (Dickinson). While churchgoers are attempting to “get” to heaven, the narrator is “going”. Dickinson expresses a spiritual journey in her spiritual life; the consistency of change found in Dickinson’s religion directly challenges the grasping search of those in a church. These tenses of go emphasis the point of a liberating experience for the person worshipping at