Of Death and Emily Dickinson

A detailed Summary of Of Death and Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's obsession with death in her poetry has fascinated people for over a century. Her use of dark, morbid language was relatively unique in mid-nineteenth century poetry, especially for a woman. The subject of these poems ranged from just wondering about death or the processes leading up to it, to Emily actually lying on her own deathbed. Throughout her life, she experienced extensive personal struggles, including her own battle with long-term illness, and the death of many loved ones. This paper will discuss how Emily Dickinson's life affected her poetry and also offer an interpretation of one of her most famous "death poems."

Emily was born in 1830 to an educated Puritan family in the small farming town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Given a well-rounded education in her childhood and teens, she went off to seminary school, but illness brought her home after the first year. She soon settled in to the life of "mother's helper" and oldest daughter. Being part of the social crowd in her small town was important, but Emily often stayed home to tend to her sick mother.

She befriended two men during this important time in her life. Leonard Humphrey was the principal of the local school, and Benjamin Newton wor

Perhaps from having struggled with so much personal loss, Emily felt the right to show what Death was like. It could be that she had an epiphany of what Eternity was. Or maybe she just wrote what she hoped for herself in the future. Regardless, Emily Dickinson had a very difficult life in many different aspects. She was inspired to write from her own life's events, whether it was love, nature, pain, or even mortality, in this case. In her short years, Emily faced death numerous times, but it was only after her own that her broken heart could finally be at peace.

The house to which they refer is a coffin, with the swelling of the ground being a freshly dug burial plot. With the amount of dirt a coffin displaces, the replaced dirt makes a large mound when covering the coffin. A cornice is a decoration between the ceiling and top of a wall- again this refers to the physical casket because it is in the ground.

Emily's last years were extremely heart-wrenching; her mother died in 1882, her favorite eight-year-old nephew Gilbert in 1883, and Judge Otis Lord in 1884. She experienced an emotional breakdown, from which she never recovered. In 1886 Emily's doctors diagnosed her as having Bright's disease, a kidney disorder. She finally died as a result of this on May 15, 1886. In her lifetime, Emily wrote almost 1,800 poems.

We paused before a House that seemed

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Approximate Word count = 1519
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English