There is seldom any poet that can lay claim to as many deaths as Emily Dickinson. Her short, albeit rich, poetry is riddled with accounts of inner turmoil and a wide-range of dark subjects, such as depression and death. Historically, Dickinson comes across as a morbid recluse, clad in white and obsessed with mortality (“Emily Dickinson” 481). Though it was not unusual, for someone of her time, to be so conscious of death. In fact, in the 1850s, most of life was spent in mournful preparation of the inevitable. In one particular poem, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”, Emily Dickinson brings forth a new perspective on the end of life with the “strategic use of the past tense linked to the survival of the narrator to imagine the experience
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Suddenly, Death is no longer the undertaker we stereotyped him to be, Death is not the unpleasant thief of life; Death is a man with the capability to be gentle. Perhaps that is why we notice that the narrator is not at all shocked or mournful. She has come to comfortable terms with the inevitable. Death is like an old friend she has grown fond of over the years. In these two lines of poetry, Dickinson “suggests that the problem of mortality is one of mindset…” (Engle 74). This is not the only poem by Emily Dickinson where mortality is given unlikely human characteristics. In “I heard a Fly buzz –when I died”, the poet symbolizes the moment when Death comes upon her as “that last Onset- when the King be witnessed- in the Room” (“Emily Dickinson” 485). Death becomes a man in a position of power, someone with a heavy presence. Emily Dickinson’s Death becomes someone to be respected. Each stanza in this poem depicts the narrator’s “journey from one world to the next” as she travels through life accompanied by Death (Nesteruk 32). Dickinson seems to suggest that we grow to see life as a never-ending journey, when it is instead a short carriage-ride to the grave. In the last stanza, when the narrator reaches her end, she
Suddenly, Death is no longer the undertaker we stereotyped him to be, Death is not the unpleasant thief of life; Death is a man with the capability to be gentle. Perhaps that is why we notice that the narrator is not at all shocked or mournful. She has come to comfortable terms with the inevitable. Death is like an old friend she has grown fond of over the years. In these two lines of poetry, Dickinson “suggests that the problem of mortality is one of mindset…” (Engle 74). This is not the only poem by Emily Dickinson where mortality is given unlikely human characteristics. In “I heard a Fly buzz –when I died”, the poet symbolizes the moment when Death comes upon her as “that last Onset- when the King be witnessed- in the Room” (“Emily Dickinson” 485). Death becomes a man in a position of power, someone with a heavy presence. Emily Dickinson’s Death becomes someone to be respected. Each stanza in this poem depicts the narrator’s “journey from one world to the next” as she travels through life accompanied by Death (Nesteruk 32). Dickinson seems to suggest that we grow to see life as a never-ending journey, when it is instead a short carriage-ride to the grave. In the last stanza, when the narrator reaches her end, she