Portrayal of Death and Nature in Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Authors:
1. Irina Ishrat
Senior Lecturer,
Daffodil International University,
Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
Corresponding Add:
C/O: Zamshedur Rahman
320/1, Avenue-2; Bloc-A
Section:13, Mirpur-1216
2. Asma Alam
Senior Lecturer,
Daffodil International University,
Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
Corresponding Add:
228-229, Malibag Bazar Road,
Biswas Malobika (Second Floor) Flat # F2
Dhaka- 1217.
Portrayal of Death and Nature in Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Abstract
Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems contain evidence of her experimentalism. Her poems
feature a familiar rhythm used in an innovative and unexpected way. The content of her
poetry not only challenges the poetic tradition of her time but also her existence as a
female writer in traditionally male-dominated nineteenth century America. As a female
poet Dickinson has been portrayed as singular and enigmatic. The past fifty years or so
have seen an outpouring of books and essays attempting to explain her poetry, and others
have tried to explain her life by referring to her poems. The following essay offers a
discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poems ‘Because I could not Stop for Death’ (712), ‘I
heard a Fly Buzz-when I died’ (465), ‘I felt a funeral in my Brain’, (280) ‘A Route of
Evanescence’ (1463), ‘A Bird came down the Walk’ (328) ‘I taste a Liquor never
Brewd’(214) ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ (986), ‘What Mystery Pervades a Well’
(1400). The discussion of these poems attempts to find out what death and nature meant
for her and why she was so much concerned about the process. Apart from this it is also
our focusing area to show how the vocabulary emphasizes these two themes.
Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson is presenting herself not as a
sentimental poet but as a woman of Letters with an artistic agenda of profound scope and
vision, reflecting what Mathew Arnold would term ‘high seriousness’. Emily Dickinson
led a privileged life with a financially comfortable and well respected family in a deeply
Calvinist New England community. Her world was her father’s home and garden in a
small New England town. She lived most of her life within this private world. Her
romantic visions and emotional intensity kept her from making all but a few friends.
Because of this life of solitude, she was able to focus on her world more sharply than the
other poets of her time. Today Dickinson is considered as a preeminent and inventive
poet; she took risks and ventured beyond the poetic convention of her time. Many of
Dickinson’s poems show her interest in trying new things or establishing elements in new
ways. Her poems reveal an unusual awareness of herself and her world, a shy but
determined mind. Every poem was like a tiny micro-chasm that testified to Dickinson’s
life as a recluse. Dickinson’s lack of rhyme and regular meter and her use of ellipsis and
compression were unimportant as long as her irregular poetic form are her original
attempts at liberating American poetry from a stale heritage.
Emily Dickinson seeks connecting pattern in life rather than the metaphysical
explanations of life. Through her writing, Dickinson expresses anxiety about the
uncertainty of life and paradoxically puts stress on the profound importance of life’s
journey. The poet wholeheartedly rejects the standard dualisms that divide the world into
flesh and spirit, saved and damned, mortal and immortal. She projects a world that is very
much similar to Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball’- that is, someone who embraces life’s
fullness and complexity with complete objectivity- and acts as a guide to open up the
world in its harmoniously disparate fullness. The danger of living alone in one’s own
consciousness is that the individual may begin to create private meanings for words and
symbols which others do not have the key to. So the language, instead of communicating,
baffles the reader.
To fully understand Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward life one must struggle, as
Dickinson herself did, with the problem of death. Death was a problem for Dickinson, an
enigma she could never solve but which she always explored. What makes us interested
reading her death poems is that her poems seem to embrace the possibility, even
probability, of immortality and an afterlife. Her mission is not to clarify death but to
explore its silence, mystery, and unknowability as well as to record the range of emotions
that the frightening mystery of death awakens in the human heart. Though her fascination
with death might seem an abnormal obsession to contemporary readers in a culture that
pushes death to the margins of consciousness, such interest was in fact quite
commonplace in nineteenth-century Victorian America. Nineteenth-century America
often depicted death as a gentle angel, or a lover, conducting the faith as blissful new
home. However Dickinson’s depictions of death are much more complicated and stark
than conventional representations. She reverses the cultural ideas in order to convey her
own more complex attitudes toward death and the afterlife.
Some of Dickinson’s most famous and powerful poems turn on the connections they
make with reversals of sentimental notions of death and immortality. While sentimental
fictions were designed to cover death’s fearful darkness with soft language and familiar
images, Dickinson’s poems often stripe death of such reassuring language, highlighting
instead its mystery and uncertainty. Dickinson’s extremely famous poem Because I could
not stop for Death—(712) draws on the sentimental idea of death as a gentle lover
escorting his love to a new and blissful home.
Because I could not stop for DeathHe kindly stopped for meThe Carriage held but just OurselvesAnd Immortality. [c:1863, 1890]
The motif of death as a courtly lover is highlighted in the poem. Death here is “kindly”
and offers the narrator a smooth journey to the afterlife. The journey is slow, not
frightening hasty or bumpy, and death is full of chivalric “civility”. As in all of
Dickinson’s complex works, however, the language and structure of the poem have left
readers plenty of room to find varying and sometimes sharply opposed interpretations. In
the first stanza she is called by death and has to put ‘labour’ and ‘leisure’ aside. She
recalls different stages of life, according to Farr (1997:330) ‘as if in accord with the
theory that one’s life flashes in various sequences before the soul as it leaves the body,
Dickinson describes childhood, maturity and old age’. Exactly half way to the poem she
realizes she is not passing through the world but the world is passing by her. It creates a
strong sense of separation between the living and the dead. Some view the poem as
Dickinson’s ultimate statement of the soul’s continuance; at the other end of the spectrum
are those who see the poem as intrinsically ironic and riddled with doubt about the
existence of an afterlife. Meanwhile in the middle are those who find the poem
indisputably ambiguous. The poem has quickly moved from the positive image of the
“Fields of Gazing Grain” to the darker image of the “Dews…quivering and chill” that
threaten a vulnerable body clad with “only Gossamer” and “only Tulle”. Finally we
discover the speaker is in a different order of time, where centuries feel shorter than a
single day of her dying. This is the only description of Eternity and what it implies is that
life is immeasurably denser, fuller, weightier. Eternity has no end, but it is empty.
Again Dickinson imagines dying as anticlimactic in the poem I Heard a Fly Buzz When I
Died (465) . If the poem Because I Could not Stop for Death highlights the transition
from life to death and exploration of the moment of dying, she clings to the final
moments of stillness, stasis and expectation in the world of the poem I Heard a Fly Buzz
When I Died. With open-eyed determination, she pushes her imagination and the reader’s
to the extreme limits of what a dying person might perceive. According to Farr
(1997:310) the speaker is already dead, ‘Dickinson’s audacious opening line demands
that her reader listens to the remembrance of a dead person whose consciousness has so
survived the transitus that it can describe for us the first step of the journey’.
I heard a Fly Buzz-when I died
The stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air-[c. 1862, 1896]
Here we can perceive the border between life and death, the stillness in the air and in the
room are a kind of contrasting border together with the buzz that she hears when dying.
The very moment of silence when ‘the king’ (death personified) enters the room
represents the end of life with a last will and testament.
The fly that the dying person sees is something so insignificant for us that it creates an
intense contrast with the fact of witnessing the death of a person. According to R.
Lee(229) ‘the Fly’s buzz, the aimless, intrusive noise which plays into and against the
“stillness” of the death-chamber, yields nothing less than a drama of the grotesque, the
formality of leave-taking from life and one’s home and family subverted by this frenetic
winged intruder, an unwitting insect messenger of the very last moment of
consciousness.’ The final words ‘see to see’ inch the reader closer to the perception of
the final moment. They seem to imply two levels of perception, with the second ‘see’
denoting physical vision, while the first suggests a state prior to that, a certain modicum
of life force, perhaps, required for visual perception to take place. The last line also takes
us right to the very edge of life, the penultimate moment of sensation, an astonishing
imaginative feat.
The famous, dreamlike poem I felt a Funeral in my Brain (280) generates varied
interpretations. Biographer Cynthia Griffin exclaimed that the speaker is reporting from
beyond the grave, on what went on at her funeral, describing the transition from life to
death. To some readers it is not death itself, but an experience similar to it, one of
encroaching mental disorientation, that takes the speaker into realms for which there are
no commonly shared descriptive words .Scholar Judith Farr sees the poem as a clinically
accurate account of a fainting spell, while critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
interpret death as a metaphor for madness and “psychic fragmentation.” Another way to
understand the role that death plays in this poem is to view it as both a metaphor for
mental unravelling and as the very real, literal concern that leads to this dissolution. The
question of what comes after death, pounding relentlessly in her brain, weakens the
foundations of her inner world and sends her plunging downward. A study could be made
that the funeral commemorates the death of her hopes for love and acceptance from
whom she seems to have loved at that time, or some other crisis in her personal life. As
we see in the case of Dickinson that the language, imagery and the structure of her poems
resist being tied down to a single “situation” rather she is venturing into uncharted
psychic realms where the mind’s usual structures are breaking down. Biographer Richard
B. Sewall notes that writing a poem such as this, about loss of consciousness and control,
requires the magnificent degree of poetic mastery and there was nothing wrong with her
mind when she wrote this particular poem.
Dickinson makes extensive use of the ordering elements of poetry, including metaphor,
sound play and phrase repetition in order to counterbalance the speaker’s increasing sense
of disorder and loss of self. She again employs the device of extended metaphor in the
first three stanzas to furnish the funeral with the mourners, a service and the lifting and
carrying away of a coffin. The funeral is an external image of her inner world; it never
stands outside the speaker. “They” and “I” form an interconnected reality, “the Funeral,
in my Brain,”in which the speaker is “invaded” by the funeral but still is able to speak of
herself and “the Mourners” in distinct terms.
As the coffin is being removed (line 12), the funeral metaphor breaks down and the poem
tumbles into vaster, even less definable realms of absolute essences: Space, Being,
Silence.
Then Space—began to toll,
As all the Heavens were the Bell,
And being but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here- [c:1861, 1896]
Instead of a bell the Space itself begins to toll in her head. It appears as if the Heavens
have become one great producer of portentous sound (a bell), while ‘Being’ (the speaker)
is the receiver (Ear) of that sound. If the poem is about psychic fragmentation, then
perhaps all these elements (sound and silence, unity and isolation) are parts of the
speaker. As in a dream, they appear alien ( “some strange Race”) are unintegrated.
Death eventually comes in the last stanza with a final “then” which symbolises the end
of the journey through the border between life and deathAnd then a Plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and downAnd hit in a world, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—thenWe can read the last ‘then’ as the last step toward death, as the moment of loss of
consciousness.
As a passionate poet, Emily Dickinson like death has scrutinized nature and its different
elements with her greedy eyes to get the message from them according to her own
philosophy. Her concern with the essence of living has inspired her to eliminate the
inessential from experience to get the pure one and that has distinguished her from all
other things and experiences. In this context the comment of Henry W. Wells can be
cited“…….life is simplified, explained and reduced to its essence by interpreting the vast
whole in relation to the minute particle”.
During the time of Emily Dickinson, orthodox Protestantism in its Calvinistic guise was
playing a major role in strengthening Amherst society of nineteenth century. This New
England faith often called as Puritanism made the Puritan’s to see the God’s will
everywhere in the signs of nature. Following the footsteps of Emerson, like Whitman,
Thoreau- Emily tended to see man’s spirit manifested in nature. Sometimes she tried to
see the human mind reading its feelings into nature.
Besides expressing her admiration for different seasons, flowers, bees, birds and insects,
she has shown the elusive quality in natural objects in her poem A Route of Evanescence
(1463), Dickinson’s one of the beautiful, short and very popular nature poems. In this
poem when she is giving a keen and exact description of a humming bird and its swift
flight, it conveys her another philosophy about beauty- ‘all we secure of Beauty is its
Evanescence’ that means beauty is transitory. In this poem the idea of evanescence is
rendered in terms of motion, sound and color intricately woven into an image pattern by
synaesthesia. This synaesthetic blur of color and motion with the heavy alliteration, the
repetitive rhetorical pattern evoke the illusion of evanescence. The last part of the poem
describes the bird’s gathering nectar from the flowers from the blossom’s own point of
view imagining that blossom as a person. Above all, the description and vivid imagery of
the bird’s morning ride as incredibly swift all these are sufficient to convince the readers
that the bird is completely at home in nature and serenely confident of its power. Thus the
poem ‘A Route of Evanescence’ not only contains most famous nature portrait but also
conveys Dickinson’s keen sense of nature’s mystery and elusiveness.
When the poet Dickinson is very oblivious about the harmonious relationship between
man and nature and expressing her doubt about the possible understanding between them,
she writes the poem A Bird came down the Walk (328). This poem is more enjoyable than
the poem A Narrow fellow in the Grass. Here the narrator is more reflective than that
above mentioned poem. Being influenced by Puritanism here she develops a new modern
concept where she feels that nature is alien to man because the external world is
ultimately unknowable by the mind: even its forms vanish before man’s eyes. In the first
two stanzas she skillfully gives a concrete detail of the bird which is feeling at home in
the nature and is enjoying an angleworm as his food. Thus, the narrator wants to show
how nature goes on in its spontaneous informal way maintaining a distance from the
world of human being. This informal and spontaneous approach is hampered when the
bird senses the presence of the narrator. This intrusion of human being in his(bird’s)
world, turns the bird’s eye into ‘frightened beads’. Later on, the birds departure into an
ocean of air where all of creation is seamless- tends to show that nature is finally
separated from man. This message pervades much of Dickinson’s poetry.
Another nature poem of Emily Dickinson can be referred here as a very sensuous and
unique one and that is I Taste a Liquor never Brewed (214). Here the poet may be writing
a parody of Emerson’s transcendental poetic inspiration in his poem Bacchus, which
starts in the way:
“Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape…..”
In her poem Dickinson ignoring that transcendental aesthetic philosophy of Emerson, is
illustrating an intoxicated unity of self and nature. Using the metaphor of drunkenness
or intoxication, she is expressing how the beauty of nature elates her. Her poetic genius
has inspired her to arrange the verses of this poem to such an extent that after a while we
can easily perceive that the liquor which she has drunk must be a spiritual and not a
physical substance. Thus with the help of hyperbolic fantasy and other extravagant
techniques, the poet has contemplated in the mysteries of the cosmic process.
Again in the poem A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (986), when the poet is describing the
movement of snake with the help of hirsute metaphor and well-crafted imageshe also tries to explore a disturbing investigation of nature’s mystery. The title itself is
also referring to her attitude towards the snake. She counts the snake as a fellow- an
earthly fellow existing with human being rather than a snake. Her tone is respectful,
admiring, surprised but not shocked. But in the last part of the poem-
“But never met this fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And zero at the bone- “
The experience of the speaker is shocking and chilling. Through the use of metaphor
‘zero at the bone’ she is referring to unfamiliar and frightful feelings which stand for
aggressive or evil aspect of nature.
The poem What Mystery Pervades a Well (1400) contains the mysterious aspect of nature
through the limited knowledge of human being. The image of ‘well’ with its unseen
bottom allures her readers to follow how the concentration of the poet moves from the
larger vistas of nature to the thought of death. The mystery is pervading whenever she
uses the metaphor of ‘neighbor from another world’ or the conversion of homely lid of
glass into ‘an abyss’s face’. This mysterious nature is eliminated instantly when she
compares ‘grass’ with ‘sedge’ or ‘the well’ with ‘the sea’ and these superficial likenesses
are denoting to the inter-connected nature between man and earth. Later on in the
penultimate stanza-
“ But nature is a stranger yet;
The one’s that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house
Nor simplified her ghost.”
Idea of fear and mystery replace that fearless and familiar mood. Here the both images of
‘haunted house’ and ‘the ghost’ have been used to emphasize on the mysterious and
haunting qualities of nature. In this context we can cite again the comment of Yotu
Miyata from his article ‘The Rejection of the Traditional Idea of Nature in Emily
Dickinson’s Poems’ :
‘The word ‘haunted’ originally meaning to be visited by a strange form of a spirit, may
imply that nature is haunted by an unidentified ghost. Perhaps this unidentified ghost
nature’s inner truth: it can never be revealed to man, though it has many outer aspects to
be observed and to make man imagine what they stand for. Nature never permits
simplification by Dickinson.’ (81).
Maintaining the same notion of mysterious nature Dickinson is bringing conclusion of the
poem saying that the more men will try to scrutiny the mysteries of nature, the more the
mystery of nature will continue to evolve.
As a powerful poetic voice and literary figure, Emily Dickinson’s genius lies in the fact
that she anticipated the psychological preoccupations and poetic themes and practices
that we grapple with today and will continue to engage throughout the twenty-first
century. It can be said Emily Dickinson talks about death from an objective point of
view, as the imperceptible fact which happens everyday. She talks about death as a desire
for salvation. To her death is an endless journey, eternity that is associated to life and
nature. There are a number of philosophical nature poems where we observe her
confronting mystery and fright with a combination of detachment and involvement. She
views death positively, as a part of the cycle of nature where we are the continua between
life and death. It is true that though Emily Dickinson delights and expresses a
sentimental enthusiasm about the red breast of the robin and colourful butterflies, she
could see the revelation of any divine entity in nature. Due to her experimentalism and
witness, Ruland and Bradbury affirm, Dickinson is “a writer in whom the legacy of
nineteenth-century Romanticism turns toward the complexities of twentieth-century
Modernism.” (1992:178)
References:
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed.Thomas H. Johnson. Canada: Little,
Brown And company Limited, 1960. Print.
Benfey, Christopher. Emily Dickinson: Life of a Poet. New York: George Braziller,
1986. Print.
Bennet, Paula. Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. New York: University of Iowa Press,
1991.Print.
Bloom, Harold. Emily Dickinson :Modern Critical Views). New York: Chelsea
House, 1999. Print.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry . 4th ed. Ed. Ferguson Margaret, Mary Jo Salter,
and Jon Stallworthy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996. Print.
The Norton Anthology of American literature. 6th ed. Ed. Baym, Nina. New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 2003. Print.
Farr, Judith.The passion of Emily Dickinson. Harvard University Press. 1997. Print.
Leiter, Sharon. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her
Life and Work. USA: An imprint of infobase Publishing. 2007.Print.
Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. USA: Cambridge
University Press, NewYork.2007. Print.
Smith, Martha Nell and Mary Loeffelholz, eds. A Companion to Emily Dickinson.
UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008. Print.
Warren, Austin. “Emily Dickinson”. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Richard B. Sewall. USA: Prentice-Hall., Inc., Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.1963. Print.
Marcus, Mordecai. Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems. New Delhi: Kalyani
Publishers. 1994. Print.
Hagenbüchle, Roland. Precision and Indeterminacy in the Poetry of Emily
Dickinson.n.p. n.d. Web.January12,2012. www.hagenbuechle.ch/pdf/precision.pdf
Declaration for Banglavision:
Date: November 18, 2012
1
Name of the title: Portrayal of Death and Nature in Emily Dickinson’s poems.
2
Name of the first author : Irina Ishrat
3.
Profession & Designation: Teaching at Private university and working as Senior
Lecturer
4
Organization: Daffodil International University
5
Address:
i)Irina Ishrat.
Corresponding Add:
C/O: Zamshedur Rahman
320/1, Avenue-2; Bloc-A
Section:13, Mirpur-1216
Mob: 01711079072
ii) Asma Alam
Corresponding Add:
228-229, Malibag Bazar Road,
Biswas Malobika (Second Floor) Flat # F2
Dhaka- 1217. Mob: 01711909727.
6
Email: irinaishrat@gmail.com. alamasma@ymail.com
7
Co-author: Asma Alam
Senior Lecturer,
Daffodil International University.
This is to declare that the above mentioned information is correct and valid. We also
declare that the research article (mentioned in point) was carried out by us and the
content of the paper was not published/submitted for publication anywhere before.
Irina Ishrat
Asma Alam