Written Task ED Word

One of the finest American poets, Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1850 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her style of writing poems was very different and unique for her era she was living in. Although women did not have a lot of authority in America at that time such as they weren't allowed to vote or did not have a lot of freedom of speech, Emily Dickinson had a different mindset and hence could not publish her poems when she was alive. Out of the 1800 poems or so written by her, most of them are related to the theme ‘Death’ or ‘emotional disturbance’ and ‘passion for nature’. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were few. The people with whom she did interact, however had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was also influenced by Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. She mentioned in one of her letters that he was one of her closest ‘earthy friend’. She also had other romantic relationships and unrequited love. By the 1860s, she lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world but actively maintained many correspondences. She spent great deal of time with her family. Dickinson was troubled from a young age, by the deepening menace of those who were very close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and her very close friend grew ill from typhus, Emily was traumatised. It was maybe then that she wrote the poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”. The theme of the poem revolves around the consequences of death or loss, to finally letting go of the pain. The poem tells us that often great traumas are followed by a period of numbness. Numb nerves, a confused heart, robotic mechanical feet and people freezing in the snow all of these images add up to paint a vivid picture of the inner life of somebody who is deeply disturbed after experiencing something awful. Dickinson talks about her experience of how she dealt with the consequences of pain and like most of the poems, even this poem is a descriptive one. She used to lock herself in the room, write letters to her close mates and write such poems. Indeed her life was not ordinary. Another example of her very famous poems about death is ‘Because I could not stop for death’, which talks about how death came calling on her. Death in the form of a suitor, stops to pick up the speaker. As they pass the town, she watches children play, fields of grain and the setting sun which symbolises different stages of her life. Slowly dusk sets and it becomes chilly. In the end we find out that Death took place centuries ago but it seems like just yesterday. She points towards ‘Eternity’ or in other words, signalled the passage from life to death to after life. This again emphasises her passion for death. She has lost many people who were close to her so death was not unfamiliar for her. After Austin, her brother, distanced himself from her family, and after her mother died, she found her world upended. In the fall of 1884, she wrote a letter saying “ The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come.” She also writes a poem ‘I heard a fly buzz’ in which she describes the last moments of a person on the death bed. We don't really know how she wrote it, because it could only be written by a persona who experiences death keeping in mind the poem was detailed and descriptive. Emily Dickinson was ill and on her death bed for a long time before she died, so it might have been that she wrote this poem during this time. However, this is not the only side of hers. There is another significant side to her that is when she writes poems about nature. ‘A bird came down the walk’ is one of the finest examples of her nature verse. The narrator chances to see a bird walking along the pathway, but just as the scene appears perfect, the bird seizes a worm, bites it into two and devours it . The bird drinks the dew on the nearby grass and when caught, naturally fearful, flies away into its own element of home, that is air. The main theme conveyed through this poem is that anyone and everyone is comfortable, or feels safe in their own element of home. She beautifully describes nature and its natural characteristics. In fact all her poems include elements of nature. ‘Hope’, this poem perfectly describes her passion for nature and she symbolises hope in the thing with feathers, that is a bird.
She describes the bird as a thing with feathers who sings a tune and never stops at all, it puts all its effort against the huge storm and does not lose hope. This shows that she was a nature admirer and spent hours looking at the details of the same. Her poems are unique as they contain short lines, typically lacking titles and often with the use of slat lines as well as unconventional capitalisations and punctuations. She proves that it is not necessary to travel widely or lead a life full of romantic grandeur and extreme drama in order to write great poems. Alone in her house, she pondered her experience as fully as she could and felt it as acutely as possible