Emily Dickinson's Poetry: My Life Closed Before Its Close

Beverly Nau
August 9, 2013
Dickinson’s Relationship with Death
My life closed twice before its close –
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry explored many themes including love, self, and nature, but she also wrote of death, including her own, resulting in death being the subject in one-fourth of her poems. Her poem “My life closed twice before its close” exemplifies how the combination of her reclusive lifestyle, despair over lost loved ones, and her questioning the beliefs of the Puritan religious culture of that era fostered her fascination with death
and immortality. The first line: “My life closed twice before its close” indicates that there have been two events during the life of the speaker that were so traumatic that it had the painful equivalent of death.
Dickinson does not specify what the loss is, but for the events to be the equal of the speaker’s life closing, it would have to be something that would cause traumatic bereavement, such as the loss of a loved one or the end of a relationship. The “closing” of the speaker’s life is not a physical death, but more of a spiritual one, and the speaker has experienced it twice during his or her lifetime. The final “close” in this line would be the actual physical death of the speaker. Emily Dickinson experienced several traumatic losses during her lifetime, the most prominent being two family members: her mother from a stroke in 1875 and her 8-year-old nephew, Gilbert, in 1883. There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is quite possible that the loss of these two family members are the two closings mentioned in the first line of the
poem.
Some credit her fascination with death to an interest in science and that she used her poetry as a “means to understand life and to unravel the mystery surrounding death” (Walker). The next three lines of the first stanza, “It yet remains to see / If Immortality unveil / A third event to me” shows that there is no way of perceiving what the future holds. There are various opinions of death and what happens after death, but Dickens expresses that death is unknowable and ultimately inevitable. She felt that death led towards eternity or immortality, but there was still an uncertainty surrounding the unavoidable.
Others believe she questioned the religious beliefs of her family and community and sought to come to a realization of her own beliefs through her poetry. She has capitalized Immortality in the third line, personifying it. It was stated that “for Dickinson, the crucial religious question was the survival of the soul after death” (Xiao-chuan). Although the Puritan culture was prominent at the time, Dickinson was “deeply ambivalent” towards this religious culture (Scheurich). Instead, Dickinson “favored the Emersonian partial reversal of Puritanism that conceived greatness of soul as the source of immortality” (Xiao-chuan). Her poems reflect her own perception of religion with death represented as a personal experience. Dickinson wrote to get “as close as she could” to death before actually experiencing it (Mitchell, Stuart).
It has been argued that Dickinson suffered from agoraphobia and an anxiety disorder and that her obsession with writing about death provided an outlet for the internal, emotional trauma she experienced due to her self-imposed isolation. She moved into the family home and by the 1860s she lived in almost total seclusion save for a few visitors. She spent most of her time with her family and a few select friends, so these relationships were extremely precious to her. The next stanza, “So huge, so hopeless to conceive / As these that twice befell,” describes the closings or losses as so large they are inconceivable. Sometimes a loss is so monumentally profound that it is overwhelming for the person or persons left behind. When Dickinson lost people such as her close friend Helen Hunt Jackson and Judge Otis Lord, with whom she had a romantic relationship, it was more than just a saddening event; it was devastating. The losses of her mother and especially her nephew at such a young age were, as she described in her poem, “hopeless to conceive.” In “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” she is quoted as having written, “The crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me” (Johnson, Ward, 875). The enormity of the losses in Dickinson’s lifetime weighed heavily on her and guided her emotional state, which in turn influenced her writing.
The final two lines of this poem, “Parting is all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell” have become quite well known. With heaven and hell being complete opposites, Dickinson uses them to symbolize the best and worst that death offers. These opposite symbols are oddly connected by the word ‘parting.’ Dickinson does not capitalize either word, although in most religious cultures both are capitalized as destinations or locations. Dickinson placed more emphasis on Immortality, or eternal life after death, than she did on heaven or hell.
The word ‘parting’ in this instance is the equivalent of death. ‘Parting is all we know of heaven’ indicates that we must be parted from all our loved ones; that we must leave them behind on Earth in order to enter heaven. Yet, this permanent separation is actually all mankind really knows about heaven. The only true certainty in life is death. There really is no way in which to know anything else about what happens after death. The only thing people can hope for is that when a loved one dies that the deceased transcends into heaven, for those that believe in such a place.
“And all we know of hell” represents the personal misery and suffering people experience following a separation or death (parting) of a loved one. Although death is an inevitable part of life, sometimes the extreme anguish resulting from this parting is devastating; the worst possible hell imaginable. The emotions experienced from the loss of someone dear supersede all others and the one left behind on earth becomes immersed in their own private hell.
Conrad Aiken summed it up in his “Collected Criticism”: “She seems to have thought of it constantly – she died all her life. She probed death daily” (Emily Dickinson Museum). Emily Dickinson often made death the topic of her poetry as a means to express her emotions concerning the relationships in her life, to deal with the losses she experienced, and to convey her personal beliefs about religion and immortality. In “Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness,” Kenneth Stocks describes ‘My life closed twice before its close’ as “one of the greatest love poems ever written,” stating that “love, death, heaven and hell come together” to give a “deep, powerful insight into a universal human experience” (Emily Dickinson Museum). Emily Dickinson explored the mystery of death, using her ability to express profoundly acute emotions, and conveyed the struggle to carry on despite any inevitable, yet devastating, losses.

Works Cited “Emily Dickinson and Death”.
Emily Dickinson Museum. Trustees of Amhearst College. 2009. Web. 10 August 2013.
“The International Reception of Emily Dickinson.” Ed. Mitchell, Domhnall and Stuart, Maria. Continuum Reception Studies. (115). 9 July 2009. Web. 10 August 2013.
“The Letters of Emily Dickinson.” Ed. Johnson, Thomas H. and Ward, Theodora. Cambridge, MA. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1958. Web. 10 August 2013.
“My life closed twice before its close” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. 1997 2013. Web. 10 Aug 2013.
Scheurich, N. (2007). “Suffering and Spirituality in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” Pastoral Psychology, 56(2), 189-197.
Walker, Kristen. “Emily Dickinson and Her Perspective from Beyond the Grave.” 8 Feb 2007. Yahoo Health and Lifestyles Network. 2013. Web. 10 Aug 2013.
Xiao-chuan, Ren. “Death and Immortality: the Everlasting Themes/LA MORT ET L 'IMMORTALITÉ: UN THÈME ÉTERNE.” Canadian Social Science. 5.5 (2009):
96-99.