The Theme Of Love And Death In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Improved Essays
Emily Dickinson, an American poet, has written hundreds of poems. The total count falls just short of 1,800 (Roberts 735). Obviously, she wrote on many topics. Two of her most frequent topics are love and death. While love and death may be very common themes in many people 's writing, they are ironic themes for Dickinson for several reasons. Dickinson was never married and never had an open relationship in her life, but she did go through many deaths. This makes it ironic that she still wrote about love as though she had experienced it every day, and wrote about every death, including what she thought her own would be like.
Dickinson wrote many love poems, but she never had a relationship that has been verified. However, rumor has it that she had two relationships in her life. The first relationship was with a man named Reverend Charles Wadsworth. They met on a trip to Philadelphia. He visited her
…show more content…
"If you were coming in the fall" is a poem about someone who is away. This was most likely one of the poems written about Wadsworth since the poem was written between 1860 and 1866. The speaker talks about their lover that has moved away. The speaker basically says they would wait forever for their lover to come back. She says if he "were coming in the fall" (1) she would "brush the summer by" (2), she would wait a year and "wind the moth balls" (6), and she would count the centuries "on [her] hand" (10). Another poem that shows her wild imagination is "Wild nights! Wild nights!" This poem is about having a wild night with the one the speaker loves. The speaker says, "Wild nights should be/Our luxury!" (3, 4) basically meaning nights like these should be considered a luxury. Poems like this show how much her imagination must have come into play in these poems, considering she had never been with a man, but was still writing poems such as this

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    Dickinson's poems are filled images, metaphors and symbolism to creates memorable scenes. Her stanza forms and rhythmical nuances contribute to the poems effects. In “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” Emily Dickinson’s uses Death as an extended metaphor of what death might be like. He is not what we would think, an old clocked figure that is to be feared, but instead a young man. He is a good guy, a true gentleman.…

    • 141 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Poems 96, 479, 591, 258 and 372 were possibly not written in that same order as it is publicly stated. These centralize their themes around death, hell, heaven, pain, letting go…etc. so, if they are all theme related why would she write them separate from each other? If you are feeling some type of sadness or depression you will focus yourself in the same gloomy topics at the same time. Emily Dickinson suffered from Bright’s disease and died from it, so isn’t possible she knew she was going to die and wrote those types of poems?…

    • 567 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Since her death, many people said that Emily Dickinson was the greatest american poet ever. She was born in 1830. She spent most of her life hidden away in her massachusetts home. She wrote her poems in style for herself. She fell in love, but the love fell apart .Emily wrote her sad poems in her room.…

    • 133 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Let’s take a look at “Here Follow Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House” by Anne Bradstreet. To understand the poem better, we have to know a little about Anne Bradstreet. In a biography by Ann Woodlief, it was noted that “Anne seems to have written poetry primarily for herself, her family, and her friends” (Woodlief) Like many Puritan women she felt dominated by the strong male presence. Even though she was quite unusual for a woman of the time, primarily due to…

    • 541 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The narrator in the poem is depicted as exposed and anticipative. Dickinson declares, “I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable” (10-11). She is anticipating death, by cutting her attachment to the physical world. She is waiting for the revelation of death and what it will bring as she lies on her deathbed. Some part of her life will stay behind when she leaves the world, and transitions into death.…

    • 157 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Moving on is an essential part of life. Everyone is going to move on eventually and forget what there once was. “X. Died for Beauty” by Emily Dickinson, represents that there is a purpose for death, but life should be about living to the fullest.…

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She had a thirst for knowledge and experience, but due to her illness, she had to fulfill those needs through the use of books and poetry. Furthermore, on the personality of Miss Dickinson, Mr. Higginson describes her as talkative despite her shy outward appearance, “But soon she began to talk, and thenceforth continued almost constantly.” She was a direct and ambitious author, yet her isolation rendered her with weakened social skills, and she often presented herself as small and shy, “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers, and hardly know what to say.” (p.856) Born on December 10, 1830, Emily Dickinson is a true Sagittarius, but her illness prevented her from becoming the person she truly could have been. The final misfortune that Miss Dickinson met in her lifetime was the deprivation of love.…

    • 1052 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many people in Dickinson’s life influenced the way she wrote her poems. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and William Blake are some just to name a few. Dickinson’s poetry was affected mostly by the poets of her own time and also by her reading of the Book of Revelation. Her desire for intimacy also helped her produce some of her most notable poems.…

    • 1509 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    -Born in Amherst, Massachusetts -Poet -Transcendentalist Emily Dickinson was a poet born in 1830 who was considered one of America’s greatest poets and a Transcendentalist because she often discussed the acceptance of death. “Emily Dickinson was a poet who was born in 1830. She wrote about 1800 poems, most of them being published after her death. Her quiet life was infused with a creative energy that produced almost 1800 poems and a profusion of vibrant letters.…

    • 643 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Susan received about 250 poems from Emily. Although Dickinson's letter sending remained constant her writing did not. Throughout her career Dickinson’s writing productivity was unstable. Initially Dickinson would write poems whenever,…

    • 1295 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Brilliant Essays

    Dickinson begins by telling the reader that she and Death are passengers in a carriage. This personification is meant to show the constant presence of the idea of death in Dickinson’s life. The first stanza…

    • 2688 Words
    • 11 Pages
    • 3 Works Cited
    Brilliant Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Attitude towards Death in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry Emily Dickinson was a poet born in Massachusetts. Her works were all published posthumously as while she wrote poetry, she did not publish any of her own works. Included in these works are the poems “Because I could not stop for Death” and “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”.…

    • 1514 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Emily Dickinson The originative Emily Dickinson was a gifted poet as she composed passionate poems that baffled readers with her literary style. Using her naïve perception, Dickinson’s poetry was written on a daily basis. Through her use of quick-witted metaphors and improvised grammar, Emily Dickinson remains a classic poet whose poetry influenced American Literature today. Emily Dickinson was seen as psychologically unbalanced and reclusive in her life, as shown through her varying emotional poems which had an impact on American Romanticism, through her style of writing, which did not follow the rules of grammar, and through her connotative word meanings which intrigued the twentieth century critiques.…

    • 1598 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Emily Dickinson’s poetry reflects a sense of death and inclusiveness that stemmed from her own life. Dickinson lived a life of solitude and only accepted a few chosen people to visit her or to correspond with. Unlike those of her time period, she did not find pleasure in entertaining visitors nor did she conform to religious or societal expectations of the society she was living in. Her works of poetry correspond with her life of seclusion and only having a small social group. It has been rumored that her reclusiveness and poetry lament of an unreciprocated love that may have been related to her relationships with Reverend Charles Wadsworth or Otis P. Lord.…

    • 863 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Life, Death, and What Comes Next Emily Dickinson is well known for style of poetry, as well as her ability to tackle tough subjects. Dickinson’s poetry mainly focuses on the nature of life, death, and the afterlife. Dickinson crafted a unique style in writing. “Her dazzling complex lyrics- compressed statements abounding in startling imagery and marked by an extraordinary vocabulary- explore a wide range of subjects……

    • 2198 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays