Dickenson

Emily Dickenson was an interesting person, even though at the time she was thought to be a recluse.  She stayed at home most of the time due to reoccurring sicknesses. (I don’t remember the exact reference to this, but found this information for a paper I did in Eng 113, for Mr. Reynolds.) Much of her poetry was about death which would be a constant thought for her since she was so often sick.

                In Poem #449 she is writing as if she had died and was laid to rest next to someone that died in pursuit of the truth. Though I think she was saying that truth and beauty are the same and because she died for beauty and he died for truth they are “bretheren” and therefore they met that night as kinsmen, though their only relationship was by dying from the same thing.

                Poem # 712 I found to be very interesting. It was as if she was writing to Death that she wasn’t ready for him to come just yet.  She seemed not ready to stop writing and binding her poetry so in this poem Death stopped for her.  Death then took her through some symbolism of her life, the school and children is the symbol of her childhood. Then the “Fields of Gazing Grain-” was her adult life and the setting sun was the symbol of the end of her life, because the setting sun is the end of the day. They then stop before a house with the roof that was hard to see and the corner in the ground, a mausoleum, her final resting place. The end of this poem gives the idea that once you die time passes much more quickly than it does when you’re alive, because she said centuries had passed yet it only felt like it had been a day.

                Not in reference to death I also liked poem # 764 which was like an ode to the sun set and the end of the day. She writes about how the shadow indicates the end of the day and sun going down.