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... 89 - 90). Dust is the only Secret, is a prime example of her utilization of personification, as seen in this excerpt: Dickinson's attribution of human qualities to death through simple adjectives as well as similes investigates the personality of death, which serves as an aid to understanding deaths true nature. Her description of death an industrious, laconic, punctual, and sedate being, and her characterization of death as bold, still, and as a builder help to express her view of the calm, concise side of death. Dickinson formed an opinion regarding deaths character traits through observation of the dead and dying, which aided the relief of her apprehensions about death by allowing herself to familiarize and understand it (Ford 92). The fourth of the subcategories contains elegiac poetry, which were abundant in the first chronological writing period. In many of Emily Dickinson's elegies, the person for whom she is writing can easily be identified, but even more of these poems are so general that it appears that she has written them for imaginary individuals (Ford 92).
Dickinson's early elegies, like the works of the other three categories, lack the intensity that is prevalent in her later works, as seen in this 1860 elegy, written for her Aunt Lavina Norcross: Mama never forgets her birds, / Though in another tree / She looks down just as often / And just as tenderly (164). Dickinson likens her deceased aunt to a bird who has flown to another tree, but can still look down upon her sparrows, or children, with tenderness even though she is physically gone. The sentiment in this elegy is painfully obvious, and could seem trite to an outsider, but it is clear that this mournful lament was intended to be for a specific person, unlike many of her others, addressed to imaginary individuals. The compositions of Emily Dickinson prior to 1861 provide only a glimpse of the poetic talent that Dickinson possessed. Her technique was far from being perfected, but the potential was there, and Dickinson's ideas were opening and expanding (Ford 96). The next period, however, marked the acme of Dickinson's career.
The time between 1861 and 1865 was Dickinson's most creative period, and during these years her talent reached maturity (Ford 69 - 70). Characteristics of her poetry such as a sense of tension and urgency, the joining of the like with the unlike, and the combination of abstract speculation on death and immortality with observed fact reached full development, and opened the floodgates of her minds eye. It is no mere coincidence that during Dickinson's most prolific period, the bloodiest war in United States history, the Civil War, was taking place. Although the war did not figure in her poetry as it [did], for example, in Whitman's or Melville's, it did elevate Dickinson's awareness of death (Ford 58). Closely related to the poems of 1861 - 1865 are the works of the 1866 - 1886 period. Although her later poems are often more pessimistic and characteristic of cynical resentment, they continue to question the purpose of death and express hope for immortality.
The focus of these poems, however, tends to center more on the apparent hopelessness of solving the riddle in this life (Ford 70). The death poems of last two time periods can generally be divided into three thematic categories: the persona witnesses an actual death, the personas own death is described, or a non-dramatic work that attempts to state a general truth about death and its effect on the human spirit (Johnson 156). These divisions, coupled with the subcategories of Dickinson's early poetry, contain the key to her ability to convey her perception of death through the use of figurative language. Dickinson's primary concern in the writing of her death poetry was to study the effects of death on human perception (Johnson 156). Through her use of varied figurative language such as metaphor, personification, and euphemism, Dickinson shapes the personality of death, and thus, one is forced to alter their perception of death. Dickinson frequently substitutes phrases such as gone away and disappeared, as well as a number of phrases involving sleep, for the words death, died, and dying, which tends to lessen the harshness of her death poetry.
The intensity of her poems is still high, however, because it is the difference between separation and death, missing and mourning, that Dickinson dramatizes (Weisbuch 89 - 90). This same quality is also true of Dickinson's use of personification and metaphor. By making death human, or likening death to something that is representative of physical expiration, Dickinson creates a contrast between what is and what is perceived. In this aspect, Dickinson's death poetry is perceptively experimental because she could observe deaths effects on the mind through her own thoughts and reactions. Had Dickinson published her work while still alive, this experimentation could have been extended to critics and other readers, which would have truly given her a clearer insight to the way death functions in the psyche. Dickinson's poetic progression reflects not only her maturing talent, but also the maturation of her own perception.
Through her varied perspectives of death and the language used to convey these perspectives, Dickinson records a diary of her spiritual growth that was published for the entire world to read. Emily Dickinson thought that she had failed in her quest to conquer death, however, she came much closer than she anticipated. Dickinson did succeed in gaining a piece of the afterlife through her poetry by [making] the soul retain its finite identity in spite of physical disintegration in the wake of death, [and this] finite self conscious identity is Emily Dickinson's only stake in the post-mortal life (Khan 125). The question of what will happen after death is one that can only be answered by those who have died, but Emily Dickinson came extremely close to explaining death for the purposes of the living.
Bibliography: Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems. Comp. And Introd. Thomas J.
Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. , 1961. Ferlazzo, Paul J. Emily Dickinson. Boston: TwayneG. K.
Hall and Co. , 1976. Ford, Thomas W. Heaven Beguiles the Tired: Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1966. Johnson, Greg.
Emily Dickinson: Perception and the Poets Quest. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Khan, Mohammad Mansoor. Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Thematic Design and Texture. New Delhi: Bar Publications Private Ltd. , 1983. The New Student Bible, New International Version.
Grand Rapids: The Zondervan Corporation, 1986. Weisbuch, Robert. Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
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Research essay sample on Emily Dickinson Poetry Perception Of Death
