Dickinson's Deliberate Mystery

When we were first introduced to Emily Dickinson during class on Thursday, we discussed how her life was very private and reclusive. Many of her poems can be read almost as journal entries, as they were not published during her life. Keeping this in mind while I read her poems, I was particularly drawn to the poems that centered on the internal self that Dickinson emphasizes. For example, 260 and 340 especially stood out to me. In 260, she discusses being "Nobody" and the joy that she finds in solidarity. She notes "How dreary - to be - Somebody!," pointing out her reclusive nature (5). For Dickinson, her privacy and lack of fame during her lifetime was something she enjoyed. I thought this poem was a good representation of Dickinson's desire to be away from public life and to be alone in her own mind. In 340, she focuses on the workings inside her brain and imagines a funeral in her mind. She describes the beating of the drum at the service, the creak across her soul, and the bells of the heavens. By the 4th stanza, she writes about how she and silence are "solitary, here -" (16). This poem at first confused me a lot. It seemed to me that Dickinson was describing her own mental state and how when she found silence, or solidarity from the outside world, she entered a new place of her own as she "dropped down, and down - / And hit a World, at every blunge, / And Finished knowing - then -" (18-20). I interpreted this as Dickinson finding her own comfort away from the chaotic "sounds" of the outside world. She seems to be comfortable just with her own mind and with her internal self, but there are still so many other ways to interpret this poem. These two poems both focused on Dickinson's own thoughts and life while still being slightly vague in meaning. There is a lot of discussion about how we, as readers, are supposed to understand her work or what kind of meanings are hidden in her poems, but the vague quality of her work, particularly in the poems she did not mean to publish, may be deliberate. Perhaps the "mystery" of her poems is something that is unique to her own thoughts and mind, and we may never truly understand her internal self simply because she did not want us to understand her own personal life the way that she did. In this way, her personal life continues to remain private, even though we are still able to read into her writing.