Emily Dickinson's Vesuvius At Home

In Poem #508 of Emily Dickinson’s, the speaker depicted a scene in which they were being baptized and then crowned. This poem takes on the form of a narrative in which the speaker described how she received her name, without her awareness as an infant and soon when she got a glimpse of the world around her, she realized that she has the will to choose. As Adrienne Rick, the author of “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," described it, it is an “imagery of being "twice-born" or, in Christian liturgy, "confirmed"” (Rich, 1979). The first two lines indicated the speaker resisting who others sought her to be. The diction of found self-righteousness at the beginning foreshadows the story of the speaker, in the case of finding herself.
In Christianity, the means of grace is when God bless humans with salvation for sinning. The dropping of the crescent gave it the meaning that the speaker has done something sinful, such as losing their virginity. In Christianity, the crescent is associated with the Virgin Mary. The crescent dropping and filling up shows that the speaker now feels whole; a whole woman. The “crescent” and the “Arc” would also give meaning to the fact that she feels half-empty as a person, due to what others seem to impose on her. The “Diadem” she described represents her reward from her self-actualization; she now wears her own crown. According to the author of Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers, Mary E. Galvin, she discussed that the power of obtaining a crown is related to the speaker’s will to choose: “In choosing such a crown, she is choosing her own laurels, the crown of a poet, once again empowered only by her "Will to choose, or to reject." In choosing to be such a Queen, she will maintain power over herself with a self-given name and role, not one bestowed on her by