A World of True Imagination

A World of True Imagination

Emily Dickinson is one of those people whose imagination is the key to a fulfilling life. Her imagination in the unseen was then keys to her own happiness; she lived out every fantasy about the unseen world by portraying it through her writing. In her poems there is some aspect of her secret, imaginative life. Both the poems “Enough” and “Sleeping,” has the theme dealing with her imagination.

A theme that is portrayed through the poem “Enough,” is one about “Life.” “Enough” gives the idea that Emily Dickinson is not always content with her situation and that she realizes how her isolation limits her experiences physically. “God gave a loaf to every bird, / But just a crumb to me,” these two lines portray the loneliness that Dickinson felt being secluded from the “normal” world. Nevertheless, the two lines “I deem that I with but a crumb/ Am sovereign of them all” also reveals that she is content with her loneliness by saying that though she wonders what it would be like to be someone else, she feels she is more “Sovereign” then them (II. 15-16). Dickinson also states that she would never give up what she has in order to fit in more with society. “I dare not eat it, though I starve, --/My poignant luxury” (II. 3-4). In this two stanza, eight line per stanza, open verse poem, Dickinson also reveals that she thinks that it is a luxury to live in isolation, therefore overcoming her insecurity of being different.

A theme that is portrayed through the poem” Sleeping,” is “Time and Eternity.” In the poem “Sleeping,” Dickinson reveals her thoughts about time and eternity portrayed through her imagination. Dickinson goes about “a famous sleep” were everyone goes alone on. The “famous sleep” is referring to death ad that it “makes no show for dawn,” once you fall asleep you do not wake up again because you are then dead and gone. No matter what happens on the outside or other events, once you die nothing can be done to make you alive again, “By stretch of limb or stir of lid, --“ (I. 2-4). She also questions herself in this poem, which is different from the poem “Enough.”

In this two stanza, four lines per stanza, open verse poem, Dickinson also reveals some interesting