Death in Dickinsons Poetry

'Death, the ultimate experience, is for Dickinson the supreme touchstone. It reveals the ultimate truth or reality; it makes clear the true nature of God and the state of the soul. She held the common Puritan belief that the way a person died indicated the state of his/her soul, a peaceful death being a sign of grace and harmony with God. ‘ By reading Emily Dickinson’s poems, such as: ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’, ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, ‘I died for beauty, but was scarce’, ‘I never lost as much but twice’, we can see that ‘death’ is a topic she occasionally uses. We can say that her poems actually manifest her obsession with death and immortality, and how the loss of the desire to live causes death. She offers a creative and different perspective on the death and its effects on others, but also writing poetry about death was her way to cope with the loss of her beloved ones since she lost her mother, father, great number of friends and her nephew, and all that death around her affected her mind deeply. We also might presume that she had the great desire to explore the mystery of death and of the afterlife. In a poem ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’ death ‘is painless, yet the vision of death it presents is horrifying, even gruesome.’ In this poem she deliberately left the process of dying blank, we are not sure how the narrator dies. It was probably intentional since Dickinson believed that the way a person died showed the state of his/her soul. But still the process is peaceful, maybe telling us that death is something we all should embrace even though it is scary and daunting. Every human being will die, the end is the same for all us, and she encourages us to embrace ourselves, to make peace with the end that awaits us, to make peace with God. Death is peaceful because there is an afterlife; a somewhat better life awaits us. This poem can be set apart from her other dark themed poems because of its strange comparison to a fly and its positive

Bibliography: * Wendy Martin, The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge University Press, 2007. * Zvonimir Radeljković, American Topics, Buybook, Sarajevo, 2005 Internet Sources: