Emily Dickinson and Death

Research papers on Emily Dickinson and her fascination with death can be custom written to focus on any aspect of the poet's theme of death you need.

Emily Dickinson is a rare example of a poet who remained true to theme and subject matter in the over 1,500 poems she wrote in her lifetime. Dickinson was remarkably consistent in the fact that her poetry revealed her fascination with the following poetic topics:

• Death
• Love
• Mental pain
• Religion
• Solitude
• Nature

Among all of these subjects, her primary fascination was with death, which she focused on extensively and with great insight.

Dickinson Explores Death

In exploring the unknown of death, Dickinson often placed herself in the position of the person who was dying in an attempt to convey what it may be like to actually die. The tools she used in doing so consisted of contrasts in light and the motion of life with darkness and the timeless quality of what death may be like. Her finest poem with the theme of dying emphasizes the different aspects of compounding loss, pain, and the power of the experience along with the equally as powerful sense of gain.

Dickinson and Poems on Death

Dickinson's poems deliberately convey a persona that is overwhelmed and is unable to gain certainty. In doing so, she has often been accused of dramatizing experimental pain and loss and in the confusion of category, which destroys the dichotomy between an inner psychological event and an external social ceremony. However, this dramatic effect and confusion is part of the brilliance in Dickinson's work. For example, in the preceding illustrated poem, the treading of the mourners, so real that it is onomatopoetically repeated, is in a sense a breaking through between the world of the living and the crossing over to the world of the dead. Typologically, just as mourners at a funeral service attempt to bring reason on the unreasonableness of death, so the consciousness of the narrator is jolted in the same way by the experience and tries, with equal futility, to comprehend death.