describing death
... on this continent.” Emily Dickinson spent most of her poetry writing days behind close doors cut of from the world. She thought that the best way to master the world was to reject it, to reject nature. To Emily, nature was death. We as humans are all naturally meant to die. The best weapon against nature is immortality. Emily had a way of describing death and the road to immortality in her poetry. Since there is no true way of defeating death, she somehow redefines death and makes it so that it is not the worse day of ones life. Instead, it’s the day that you take to road to immortality. In her poem “The Chariot,” she describes her ride with death on a chariot on a road to the path of eternity. “Because I could not stop for death, / He kindly stopped for me;” Hear death has finally come for her. “The carriage held but just ourselves/ and immortality.” Now after death, she can longer die, there fore she is immortal. “We slowly drove, he knew no haste, / And I had put away/ My labor, and my leisure too, / For his civility.” Here she actually describes death as being civil. To many, and my self included, we all have a picture of what death looks like. The scary, faceless thing with a hooded cloche and a large sickle. But in her poetry, you almost don’t see death as something scary. You get the feel of something a bit gentler. In the middle of the poem death takes her on a ride through school yards and fields heeding towards the sun set. At the end of the poem the ride is still going for centuries headed toward eternity. This in this case, eternity is immortality. Death to Emily Dickinson was not something bad. In this poem it comes off as almost being welcomed. Its almost sounds ironic, one must first die in order to become immortal. After loosing so many close to her, on can only imagine what she feels. To Emily, it must have felt as if death was always close to her. Reading her poetry, I get the feel that she is ongoing...