Emily Dickinson Beliefs

It is easy to piece together attitudes towards death through things like obituaries and funerals because it gives us a raw look into death that has no argument one way or another. In the 1850’s, when Emily Dickinson was living and writing, the cultural views of death were strict. The expectation was to be respectful and glorify the dead in order to mourn them correctly. Further, one was supposed to not pine over their loss of opportunity, but learn from it and use their loss to better oneself. They also vied to assign value and life to those things that the dead left behind. Some of these values reflect clearly in Emily Dickinson’s poem, including the personification of death.
In the obit, the writer wonders “if Death had not almost emptied …show more content…
The Fly, the Stillness, the Eyes, Breaths, Keepsakes are all more important that the speaker herself, who is the person that the death is truly about. The most revealing example of this is in the last two lines of the poem: “And then the Windows failed--and then / I could not see to see-- (Dickinson 844). “I could not see to see--” is the death of the speaker. None of the words in this line are capitalized (other than I, but that is grammatically required), showing the reader that Dickinson purposefully did not emphasize this line. This lack of emphasis is amplified by the capitalization of “Windows” in the prior line. The windows may represent the speaker’s eyes. This comparison to a house, empty when without people to fill it, a body empty without a soul, is dehumanizing. Dickinson’s choice to describe her eyes failing in the final moment shows that as people assign all of a person’s value to their own loss and the items left behind, the person and soon corpse becomes an object. This shows Dickinson’s belief that in the society’s attempt to revere and retain the dead, they truly lose