We can all probably agree that death is a really scary
thing. You don’t know when or what is going to happen and there are no concrete
answers as to what happens to us when we pass the point of no return. Death in
the nineteenth century may have been even scarier; people would die from things
that we can prevent today. Have an illness? Need a blood transfusion? Those may
have well been Death itself knocking on your door back then.
Emily Dickinson, however, never displayed that dread of
death in her works. That doesn’t mean she was suicidal by any means, but there
was a sense of understanding. Overall, death wasn’t terrible. In Poem 320,
death isn’t the painful thing but rather the alternative to the light “that oppresses.”
In Poem 591, the speaker is already dead and the persistent problem is the fly
in the room with the dead body.
The idea stretches farther in 764. (I’m going to stick to
the interpretation that the speaker is a gun here.) The last stanza states, “Though
I that He – may longer live/ He longer must – than I -/ For I have but the
power to kill,/Without – the power to die –“ It’s rather ironic that the
instrument that kills cannot die itself. However, that last stanza seems to
imply that immortality is the worst thing ever. Not having the ability to be a
mortal sounds painful. It’s even worse because the person you love is gone and
you can’t join them. From certain points of view, this also means a denial into
entering Heaven.
Poem 479 may be Dickinson’s most famous poem for death. The
first two lines already establish a friendship of sorts between speaker and
Death: “Because I could not stop for Death-/He kindly stopped for me –“ Reading
those first two lines now makes me think of “The Tale of the Three Brothers” from
Harry Potter. (If you haven’t read/gotten up to this part in Harry Potter, I
highly suggest that you skip to the next paragraph.) The two lines from the
poem can definitely be interpreted as Death interrupting life and killing the
speaker. But I just keep thinking of when the third brother walks off with
Death, as equals. In that case, Death has come and it is accepted. No fear and
no attempts to run away.In some ways, Dickinson has followed a form of how literature treats death. Death can be a means of escape or even a nice rest after the chaos of life. As Dickinson shows herself, it could just be the next stop on our journey.
First off, I really appreciate the Harry Potter reference, and I think it fits in really well with the image Dickinson conjures in 764. I really like that poem. However, I think it's also interesting because while it puts death in a nicer light, it's just one of so many poems that she writes about death, and they definitely don't all follow the same theme. I wonder if she perceived death differently at different times in her life, or if she was trying to explore the topic as fully as possible, or both.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your discussion of the friendship established between the speaker and death in poem 479. It also reminds me of poem 359 in which "A Bird, came down the Walk- ...And then hopped sidewise to the Wall / To Let a Beetle pass-" (1, 6-7). It's interesting that Dickinson explore this concept of curtesy in both the speaker's relationship to death and the human-like interaction between the bird and beetle.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your post! I like your different interpretations (or rather, your view of Dickinson's interpretations) of death, and I agree that Dickinson certainly explores a deeper understanding of death that is interesting to see in her poems.
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