I think everyone will harbor fear toward death. but I can not find one poem that indicates her fears toward death. Can anyone list one or more such death poems of Emily Dickinson?:flare:
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I think everyone will harbor fear toward death. but I can not find one poem that indicates her fears toward death. Can anyone list one or more such death poems of Emily Dickinson?:flare:
Emily Dickinson did fear death. she showed it in "I Heard a Fly buzz- when I died" and "I felt Funeral in my Brain." In "Fly", she left the reader with a sudden, disturbing end when she died and "could not see to see", or she could no longer use her eyes and tell what was going on. In "Funeral", the overall tone she shows is fearful. She described herself as alone with silence, and a "Plank" of reason breaking. She falls and ends with a cliffhanger.
Like most concepts Dickinson explores, Death is an amibgous subject. She fully explores every facet - she feared it (as above), personified it as a "kindly" gentlemn caller ("Because I could not..."), she tested the emotions the dead must experince ("Twas just this time last year..." - where the dead wonder who will miss them "least") and how death effects the living ("The Last Night that she lived...").
Answer: who knows? She was obsessed with it.
Most of her poetry doesn't talk about fear towards death. I think she was more interested in it, and curious about it than afraid of it. The Victorians had a different attitude towards death than today, simply because death was more commonplace, more of a commonplace event to deal with.