英语论文网

Shana Tazabek
Aaron Crippen
English Writing (4)
20 June, 2010
Contrast and Comparison in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry
代写英语论文Emily Dickinson was an isolated, nineteenth century American poet who was out of sync with her times.  She spent most of her days locked away from society in her house where she composed over 1,700 poems.  Dickinson never intended any of them to be published; she wrote, not for the sake of art, but rather to express her emotions about life.  Many of Dickinson’s works are written in free verse and are short, their shortness inspires readers to have a deeper thought process to understand them and many demand a second look.  Emily could take her thoughts, beliefs, and emotions and transform them into words and then into a poem that was truly from her heart.  Most of Dickinson’s focus was on nature, life, immortality, and the mind; however, she was extremely interested in writing about death and love.  As a result, Dickinson’s obsessions with achieving an understanding of death and illustrating the power of love dominate her poetry.
For the most part death does not typically fascinate people, but Emily Dickinson was absolutely captivated with it.  In today’s society a person will not usually come in contact with death and would therefore not think much about it until it hit close to their family or friends.  When Dickinson was alive the mortality rates were much higher and people died younger than they do today.  Emily had experienced death first hand much more than a person of today’s society which caused her to think about its mystery.  Her poetry presents both Puritan and Christian beliefs, but she was also attracted to the new age science that was being discovered around her.  One day Dickinson had learned that when a person is about to die their last sense to go is their hearing.  She then wrote a poem entitled, “I Heard a Fly buzz- When I Died-”, where the narrator, who is already dead, is hearing his own funeral.  He starts by listening to the mourners as they pass his body, but a little fly buzzing catches his attention.  “Dickinson both asserts and refutes, we are, when contemplatively, attentively reading this poem, brought into confrontation not just with our world or the mystery of what lies beyond it, but with the mystery of our world”(Arlengo 3).  Dickinson uses a break in the verse in her first line of the poem to draw attention to the phrase “When I died”.  The fly represents all of the small things in a person’s life that could not be heard in life, but only after death.  It can also be seen “as death itself, for only seconds before the speaker dies, the fly interposes itself “between the light’ and me.” (Hendrickson 3)  It is a fact that everything must die, and Dickinson believed that if death was accepted, the small parts of life that would hold a deeper meaning would finally be noticed (Lake 2).  This poem shows how Dickinson was fascinated with the mystery of death.  She wrote about a death experience and didn’t create a dark tone, or black atmosphere
Works Cited
Abbot, Collamer M. “Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop For Death.” The Explicator.
       (Spring 2000): Vol.58, Iss. 3: 140-43
Arlengo, Kristina Z. “I heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died-.” Poetry for Students. Vol. 5.
       Boston: Gale, 1999. 3.
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