Art Is A House That Tris To Be Haunted

Brendan Boyle
Ms. Elmoznino
English 11H 4/4/15

Art Is A House That Tries To Be Haunted
Every single day we ask questions; over our lives we’ll have asked way too many to count. But of all these questions we rarely ever ask, “What really is nature”? Emily Dickinson once said, “Nature is a haunted house, but art is a house that wants to be haunted.” That might be the reason we don’t ask: we’re scared of nature. Although we aren’t scared of grass or trees or the question itself, we’re scared of how we don’t know any answers or what mysteries are lurking in the future. Emily Dickinson uses her poetry to invite us to her haunted house. Her powerful descriptions and ability to tap into the emotions of the reader make it possible to experience
Dickinson, however, explores death from a different perspective. In “because I could not stop for death” she gives death a seemingly comforting tone. By saying death “kindly stopped for me” she doesn’t seem very fearful of death, in fact death sounds welcoming and even caring. As they continue, the journey is calm before they stop at “a house that seemed a swelling of the ground” which represents her grave. However the house at the end doesn’t feel warm and welcoming like most homes. In the previous stanza she states, “The Dews drew quivering and chill.” This sentence makes reality set in that this is the end of the journey and she is at her grave riding with death. It leaves the reader with an unsettling cold feeling, the same as the “zero at the bone” feeling she describes in “a narrow fellow in the grass.” All in all, Dickinson’s grappling with death has allowed readers to come as close to experiencing the shock of death as possible without actually
“I died for beauty – but was scarce” puts the reader in a tomb, and talking with the corpse adjacent tomb. Although this really is an unsettling and horrific scene, but it’s also oddly comforting. The two corpses seem so untroubled by being dead and buried. It seems to get more comfortable as they talk to each other, until the moss slowly creeps up and covers their mouths giving a cold, dead, silence even the reader feels. Despite the dead silence and how Dickinson points out our values, names and everything that we once were will get erased with death, the ending still had a positive feel to me. As terrifying as nature can be, I still find comfort and hope in it. Walt Whitman says in the sixth part of his epic poem “song of myself” while walking and thinking of all the men, women and children who lost their lives and were buried beneath him, “they are alive and well somewhere, the smallest sprouts shows there really is no death, and if there was it led forward life.” That is where I find comfort in nature; I will always be a part of nature regardless of what happens, making even death just a part of life. Those ambiguous perceptions of Dickinson’s poetry show how her poems have really come to life. Just as people experience life differently each day, Dickinson’s readers’ experiences are so vivid that we can develop polar opposite feelings about