Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, a prominent female poet in the nineteenth century, is regarded as "the
most topping poetess in west since Sapphic." she is one of America’s greatest and original poets
of all time. Dickinson herself differed from the people of her age and her poems were unique in
her time. She started her long reclusive life especially like wearing her white dress to express her
belief. Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. she had withdrawn from all social engagement
with the world and remained unmarried. The pain of the successive deaths of relatives and
friends deepened her thinking about death. Dickinson finally calmly accepted the complexity of
the objective world, embracing the multifaceted aspects of nature and life with detachment.
Death, as an integral part of nature and death, became an important theme in her poetry. She
wrote about death in an extraordinary way, very different from the usual sentimental clichés. Her
death poems were bitter but not entirely. She treats death as a king or a friend. She regards
moving towards death as going home. Dickinson’s attitude towards death is peculiar. She always
stayed more attached to life, and when she thought about death, an optimistic fascination
emerged in her poems.
During Dickinson’s lifetime, only a few of her poems were published, the rest were compiled and
collected by her relatives and friends within 30 years after her death. After her poems were
published, she received more and more fame and acknowledgement.
作品赏析
‘Because I could not stop for Death’ is a six stanza poem that is divided into quatrains which do not follow a
single rhyme scheme, although there are examples of perfect rhyme in the poem. The meter is much more
consistent. The first and third lines are made up of four sets of two beats, or a total of eight syllables. The
first of these beats is unstressed and the second is stressed. This is known as iambic tetrameter.
The second
and fourth lines also use iambs but it is iambic trimeter.
In the poem, a female speaker tells the story of how she was visited by "Death"and taken for a
ride in his carriage. This ride appears to take the speaker past different stages of life, before
coming to a halt at what is most likely her own grave. It's not clear if the speaker is already dead,
or she is traveling towards death. Either way, her death is presented as something natural,
strange, and inescapable.
This poem is deeply symbolic. The carriage in the poem symbolizes the journey from life to death.
This journey begins when a personified version of "Death" comes to pick up the speaker,
that she was never going to stop for him on her own—he had to come to her. The carriage then
carries the speaker and immortality through a landscape that represents a kind of sped-up
version of life. In this way, life becomes a literal journey in the carriage.
The first stage is school, where the children playing. Altogether, this image represents childhood.
Now the speaker has given up striving and makes her way to the grave. The second stage along
the journey is "the Fields of Gazing Grain." The grain symbolizes adulthood and maturity. Each
year, crops are brought to maturity and then cut down to be sold. just like the human world.The
setting sun is the end of a day and the end of life. The speaker is nearing the end of her journey.
What will follow is nighttime or death.
My reflection
死亡主题对我的启示
During this spring, I’m bombarded by a lot of bad news about war, air crash, epidemic,
accidents, etc.,I was also under the heavy mental pressure of lockdown. for this I fell into a deep
depression and feel nothing make sense to me. At this very point, I read Emily Dickinson’s poems,
in which the reflections on nature, love, and death temporarily took me out of all this painful
reality and I pondered these questions together with her.
When we talking about Dickinson ,what are we talking about?
Reading her poems. I began to think about such a topic——death which my parents will never
talk with me. Death represents horror, grief and everything negative. so, I have always been
unconsciously avoiding it in my past life. But in Dickinson’s poem, Death is not destruction, but a
part of or continuation of life; and a way to eternity. The road to death is beautiful,romantic and
full of joy and . Everything in nature follows such a law from birth, growth, maturity to decay.
Death is that we go back to where one should go.
Reading her poems I also tried to look inward at myself, even though it was very shallow, I could
slowly get used to and even enjoy the feeling of being alone with myself and managed to
maintain my inner serenity.
As I read more about Dickinson, I became more fond of and respectful of this great poetess.
Dickinson was unique and rebellious , even though she seemed so submissive. She never stuck
to the traditional rules of poetry nor did she modify them to suit the preference of that age to
make them publishable. Born into a Puritan home but never going to church, she knew her inner
voices well, she followed them and she stands by her own claims, which at that time was seen
as deviant but now seems to be very progressive.
Personally, I really like reading female poets and writers’ work. Their expressions tend to be more
delicate. In Dickinson’s poems I saw a revival of female consciousness, which was not easy for
women in 19th century, and that was one of the reasons i am touched by her works.
Dickinson's value is not only to be equivalent with male poets as a poetess but also in the advent
of the era of women's pursuit of self-worth. Although her voice is not very grand, after all, it is
also free from the shackles imposed on women by the mainstream values, family and society at
that time. Dickinson's unique reflection on death is the beautiful singing voice of a free woman.