An Insight Into Dickinson's Portrayal Of Death

An Insight into Dickinson's Portrayal of Death

Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 B.C.)

Throughout the history of literature, it has often been said that "the poet is the poetry" (Tate, Reactionary 9); that a poet's life and experiences greatly influence the style and the content of their writing, some more than others. Emily Dickinson is one of the most renowned poets of her time, recognized for the amount of genuine, emotional insight into life, death, and love she was able to show through her poetry. Many believe her lifestyle and solitude brought her to that point in her writing. During Emily Dickinson's life, she suffered many experiences that eventually sent her into seclusion, and those events, along with her reclusiveness, had a great impact on her poetry.

Emily Dickinson is well known for her poems on Death.

Death eventually comes to everyone, and yet it is a phenomenon shrouded in mystery. Scholars and scientists try to understand it, philosophers pose theories and conclusions about it, artists try to capture it between streaks of paint across a canvas, while poets like Emily Dickinson explore it's meaning and influence through verse. Death is like an outward rush into the unknown where there is nothing recognizable and nothing to cling to. The unknown is always feared, and since nothing is known about death or an afterlife, people fear it.

What Dickinson's poetry delves into is the undeniable power of death to detach one from life and the pain and sorrow that accompanies it like a dark cloud above it's head.

In "There's a Certain Slant of Light" , Dickinson uses nature as the backdrop for her description of death, and the elements to describe the silent pain that it brings with it. The poem appears to create some sort of setting for the reader in order to portray this. The sight of a funeral procession entering a cemetery is probably an apt description of this setting. The slant of light is used to portray a heavenly beam that falls on the earth and brings a gloomy feeling with it. It could be the finger of God beckoning to the deceased to come to the heavenly abode or a divine path showing him the road to heaven. However, the light possesses a sort of weightiness:

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes.

This heaviness in the light may refer to the undecipherable feelings that one has, when you lose someone close to you. The second and third stanzas of the poem bring out the true profundity of these mixed emotions. Furthermore, both light and air are portrayed as symbolic of God, so that they become agents through whom God imposes His Heavenly Hurt upon the speaker, or maims her with His imperial affliction. The Heavenly Hurt may be described as the deep sorrow and pain that one feels when faced by the death of one's near and dear ones. The hurt is not physical, but emotional and psychological. It is probably deep within the speaker's heart

Where the Meanings, are

For, when someone is lost in love, deeply hurt or excessively happy, it is hard to describe what one exactly feels or understands where exactly these feelings are coming from. She still cannot pinpoint the source of her anxiety. It comes quietly, seemingly 'Sent us of the Air-' . Coming back to the setting of the cemetery, we can envision the speaker standing a short distance away from the grave watching the procession on its way. She beholds before her the entire landscape as she watches the mourners approaching. She captures the solemnity and motionlessness of death by implying that time appears to stop for death.

When it comes, the Landscape listens-

Shadows-hold their breath

What Dickinson is trying to say is that death is an irrefutable fact of life. It comes to everyone (as Horace says) and the stagnancy of time revealed in the quote above is only a depiction of her thoughts. Dickinson brings the reader face to face with reality.

While death is often ignored as a biological phenomenon that does not influence one individual's daily life, nature is accepted as the creator that sustains life on this planet. But, Dickinson provides a new insight into this by describing nature as the force that brings death to its subjects when the time has come. As Nature brings their weight of pain to bear upon the speaker, they are shown to have injured and oppressed with a conscious will (Griffith). She describes to the reader the crude side of nature: the reality of life and the suddenness of death. Contrary to common belief, Mother Nature is not quite described as a loveable and caring person. Poets have grown accustomed to thinking of Nature as a cuddly companion .Emily Dickinson's Nature is no less personal or dynamic than this - and no less a Nature read by the light of pathetic fallacy. It is simply that she sees as tigers what others have mistaken for pets (Griffith). This analogy of pets and tigers describes Dickinson's contrasting views on life, death and nature as compared to other historical and contemporary poets.

Another poem that illustrates this viewpoint like no other is "Because I Could Not Stop for Death". This poem is an example of the personification of Death as a character. However, it shares an obvious bond with "There's a Certain Slant of Light" in more ways than one. Certain beliefs and impressions that are embedded in Dickinson's mind permanently force themselves out in her poems and they can be linked together if one scrutinizes her disquieting verses.

Critics call Emily Dickinson's poem a masterpiece with strange "haunting power." In Dickinson's poem, "Because I could not stop for Death," there is much impression in the tone, in symbols, and in the use of imagery that exudes creativity. One might undoubtedly agree to an eerie, haunting, if not frightening, tone in Dickinson's poem. Dickinson uses controlling adjectives--"slowly" and "passed"--to create a tone that seems rather placid. For example, "We slowly drove--He knew no haste / ...We passed the School ... / We passed the Setting Sun--," sets a slow, quiet, calm, and dreamy atmosphere . "One thing that impresses us," one author wrote, "is the remarkable placidity, or composure, of its tone" (Greenberg). The tone in Dickinson's poem will put its readers'