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ON BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH
Abstract: Death and eternity are the major themes in most of Emily Dickinson’spoems.“ Because I could not stop for death ”is one of her classic poems.
Through the analysis, this essay clarifies infinite conceptions by the
dialectical relationship between reality and imagination, the known and
the unknown. And it tells what’s eternity in Dickson’s eyes.
Keywords: death, eternity, finite, infinite
Introduction
Emily Dickinson（1830-1886）, the American best-known female poet ，was
one of the foremost authors in American literature. Emily Dickinson ’s
poems, as well as Walt Whitman’s, were considered as a part of "American
renaissance"; they were regarded as pioneers of imagism. Both of them rejected
custom and received wisdom and experimented with poetic style. She however
differs from Whitman in a variety of ways. For one thing, Whitman seems
to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life
of the individual. Whereas Whitman is "national" in his outlook, Dickinson
is "regional"
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830.
She lived almost her entire life in the same town (much of it in the same
house), traveled infrequently, never married, and in her last years never
left the grounds of her family. So she was called "vestal of Amherst".
And yet despite this narrow -- some might say -- pathologically constricted-outward
experience, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply
passionate person who throughout her adult life wrote poems (add up to
around 2000 ) that were startlingly original in both content and technique,
poems that would profoundly influence several generations of American poets
and that would win her a secure position as one of the greatest poets that
America has ever produced. Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual
writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and
ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors
of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings
on the significance of literature, music, and art.
Emily Dickinson enjoys the King James Version of the Bible, as well
as authors such as English WRTERS William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles
Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle.
Dickinson’s early style shows the strong influence of William Shakespeare,
Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John
Keats and George Herbert. And Dickinson read Emerson appreciatively, who
became a pervasive and, in a sense, formative influence over her. As George
F. Whicher notes, "Her sole function was to test the Transcendentalist
ethic in its application to the inner life".
1“death” in Emily Dickinson’s poets
For as long as history has been recorded and probably for much longer,
man has always been different idea of his own death. Even those of us who
have accepted death graciously, have at least in some way, --- feared,
dreaded, or attempted to delay its arrival. We have personified death--
as an evildoer dressed in all black, its presence swoops down upon us and
chokes the life from us as though it were some street murder with malicious
intent. But in reality, we know that death is not the chaotic grim reaper
of fairy tales and mythology. Rather than being a cruel and unfair prankster
of evil, death is an unavoidable and natural part of life itself.
Death and immorality is the major theme in the largest portion of Emily
Dickinson’s poetry. Her preoccupation with these subjects amounted to an
obsession so that about one third of her poems dwell on them. Dickinson’s
many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur often
in the Amherst of the time added to her gloomy meditation. Dickinson’s
is not sheer depiction of death, but an emphatic one of relations between
life and death, death and love, death and eternity. Death is a must-be-crossed
bridge. She did not fear it, because the arrival in another world is only
through the grave and the forgiveness from God is the only way to eternity.
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