THE THEME OF DEATH IN THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON

Abstract

The modest selection of Dickinson’s poems reveals that death is the predominating theme in her poetry and the approach she adopted while dealing with this painful subject is quite idiosyncratic. She was not prepared to accept the old conventional ideas about it. She wanted to know what happens after we die and this is why the subject of resurrection always intrigued her. Though she had heard about this subject from the pulpit, yet she was not ready to put her complete faith in the notion of immortality. Many poems of Emily Dickinson express her doubt about immortality. On the other hand we do have the poems in which she describes her deep faith in immortality. In fact doubt and faith go together in the poetry of Dickinson. We find the lines in her poetry which depict immortality as a “House of Supposition” and heaven as an “uncertain certainty”. She preferred the finite life on earth to the infinite life in heaven. But a time came when she started regarding death as ‘the gateway to immortality’ and she understood the fact that death liberates the human soul. The most important feature of the psyche of Emily Dickinson was that she did not regard death as a bugbear to frighten the humans, but for her it was the final end of the sad existence on this earth and she regarded tomb as a place of permanent rest.