Death in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Death is not like an ordinary theme of Dickinson’s poetry, it occupied her lifelong attention. Death has been mentioned frequently in her poems together with frustration, suffering, pain, sorrow, grief and loneliness. Critics have pointed out that nearly one third of her poetry is concerned with the theme of death.↙

Death is portrayed by her from every possible aspect – as the courtly lover, the dreadful assassin, the physical corruptor and also as a free agent in nature. She was obsessed with the problem of death and subsequent life after death. ↙

In her poems on death, Dickinson closely examines the sensations of the dying, the response of the onlookers, the terrible struggle of the body of her life, the adjustments in a house after death, the arranging of the body for the funeral, the church services and even the thoughts of the dead person. ↙

Her poem “Safe in their alabaster chambers” shows that a person's belief in the resurrection: ↙

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -/

Untouched by Morning - /

and untouched by noon -/

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,/

Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone – ”

↙ ‘Funeral’ serves as an apt metaphor in her poem abundantly such as in “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” where it expresses the turmoil in the mind. ↙

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,/

And Mourners to and fro/

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed/

That Sense was breaking through –/

And when they all were seated,/

A Service, like a Drum –/

Kept beating – beating – till I thought/

My Mind was going numb –”↙

In some of her poems Dickinson has contrasted the expectations of death with its realistic occurrence. In “I Heard A Fly Buzz -When I Died-”, with a strong sense of skepticism she questions the conventional attitudes towards the moments of death. Here she says: ↙

“……. When the king/
Be witnessed in the room/
The king remains an open question –/

is it God or Death itself?”

↙The ending of the poem, however, does not suggest that it is God: ↙

“With blue, uncertain stumbling buzz/
Between the light and me;/
And then the windows failed; and then/
I could not see to see.” ↙

A reason for Dickinson’s preoccupation with death may be her involvement with religiosity. Moreover, during the 1880s Dickinson also endured the loss of several close friends and several family members.