Nature in Emily Dickinson'S poetry

Since Emily Dickinson was a child of rural nineteenth-century New England, it is not surprising that the natural scenes and figurative language would be in her works. Also she had read in the poetry of Wordsworth, Bryant, and Emerson — all products of a Romantic movement that looked for meaning, imagery, and spiritual refreshment in nature. Again, Her roots in a Puritanism that saw God manifested everywhere in nature contributed to her pursuit of personal significance in nature.

Her nature poems divide into those that are chiefly presentations of scenes appreciated for their liveliness and beauty, and those in which aspects of nature are scrutinized for keys to the meaning of the universe and human life.

In several of her most popular nature portraits, Dickinson focuses on small creatures. Two such poems are "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" (poem about a snake) and "A Bird came down the Walk" (poem about a bird) reveal Emily’s empathy and respect for creatures of nature. She regards animals as ‘Nature’s People’ in "A narrow Fellow in the Grass":

“Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality”

The later poem deals, among other things, with the relationship between nature and humanity:

“Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home —”

"It sifts from Leaden Sieves" shows Dickinson combining metaphor and imagery to create a winter scene of great beauty. An apparently more cheerful scene appears in the popular "I'll tell you how the Sun rose". Mixed feelings of a different kind are striking in "The Wind begun to knead the Grass", one of the finest of Dickinson's many poems about storms with rain. The very popular "A Route of Evanescence" often puzzles readers until they learn that Dickinson referred to it as "My hummingbird." In the popular "I taste a liquor never brewed", Emily Dickinson describes an intoxicated unity of self and nature. In "What mystery pervades a well!", nature is seen as a large-scale abstraction. In several of Dickinson's best poems, the elevating and the destructive qualities of nature balance one another. Perhaps the best known of these is the widely anthologized "There's a certain Slant of light".

Unlike the major English and American Romantic poets, her view of nature as beneficent is balanced by a feeling that the essence of nature is baffling, elusive, and perhaps destructive.