Emily Dickinson Museum

Death and its Significance in the Works of Shakespeare and A. E. Housman “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman, and “Fear no More the Heat o’ the Sun” by Shakespeare are elegies for youth who died prematurely. Through different versification, these two poems carry unique tones and attitudes. Both Shakespeare and Housman create elegies that soothe the pain of death, but they use different logic to justify their reasoning. Shakespeare juxtaposes extremes to argue that death is apathetic to…

One of the most intimate feelings is loss. As someone who does not express her intimate moments publicly, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” begins to change her dynamic with her poetry and herself. This is one of the few published poems which delve into an intimate topic and, I think, is part of the new era of Bishop poems where she becomes more open. A poem with about 17 drafts, Bishop spent a lot of time refining the poem and, in many cases, broadening it. Despite the intimacy of the subject,…

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:…

“Life changes fast, life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” This is the first few lines of Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking, a poem she refers back to on many occasions to emphasize the humanity of death. “It was far, far too pale, and still, and, well, dead, yes dead. She was dead, dead, dead, dead…” This is a quote taken from Anthony Rapp’s autobiography, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, which also shows an…

world. No, it is not Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson is one of the most influential writers of the industrial era, as she was one of the first writers to use the concept of transcendentalism in her works. This means writing about all aspects of life, even the mundane, the vulgar, and the ugly as she realized that this style of writing more closely resembles life than the classic, formal style of writing used previously. Many of Emily Dickson’s poems revolve around similar…

Death and life by the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, stared in 1908 and completed 1916, is an oil on rectangular canvas painting 178cm by 198cm, now housed at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. This painting is about how the life could be beautiful if death is not standing next to it. Death and life has two separated parts. Klimt shows death of the left side. Passing is delineated and the fantastic messenger of death, a smiling skull, secured in a dim robe secured with images. The principle…

I like this poem because of the existential themes that Edward Hirsch tackles, such as: mortality, divinity, temporality, and individuality. I can see all the images that the author describes, and feel that I am a part of the poem, too. Even though it is a short poem, it can transmit so many emotions. I think that this poem is about an old man in a wheelchair (“Wheel me down to the shore”), who feels that he is about to die. Dying is humanly, it is the normal cycle of life; therefore you can…

The poem “Upon a Fit of Sickness” interprets a strong message that every human being should realize. As anyone could know, a poem can have many symbols and creativity to relate to the main theme that hits the most. This poem, in particular, can illuminate idea dealing with death. Anna Bradstreet writes the poem to show that she finally understands of her timing for death due to a sickness. She now knows that nothing can change the fact that all humans will die, even her. She uses biblical…

An Explication of “Death” by Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson’s poem “Death” is structured in quatrains, four line stanzas. It is in Iambic meter, so each foot has one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The first and third lines of each quatrain have eight syllables, and the second and fourth have six. This means the first and third lines of each stanza consist of four feet, so those lines are in Iambic tetrameter. The second and fourth lines have three feet each, making them…

John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer of twenty-seven books, including sixteen books. six variable books, and five short stories. He is broadly known for comic books, “Tortilla Flat” and “Cannery Row”. Also known for the novels, “Red Pony”, “Of Mice and Men”, and “The Grapes of Wrath”. The vast majority of Steinbeck's work is set in southern and focal California, especially in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges. His work much of the time investigated the subjects of…