Emily Dickinson: Heaven to Death

Blake Mott

DIG1109

Professor Dorbad

16 November 2017

Emily Dickinson: Heaven to Death

        Emily Dickinson is best known for being an American poet and is well-known in the English and literature community. Dickinson’s poems are about death, life, faith and the struggle with the same faith, and the hard times in her life. Many of her early poems talk about her faith and the relationship with god, but as she aged, she slowly was distancing herself from people and her faith. Her later poems talk about death and decay and contrast the brighter thoughts she once wrote about. Emily Dickinson was struggling with her faith and realization of death that people go through every day.

        Emily Dickinson’s life was not without troubles and hardships. In her life, she has seen death and had overwhelming present of death throughout her life. Later in her life, her lover passed away and “she even thinks of suicide as a means of rejoining the lover who has ceased to exist for her in the real world” (Ward 54). While death loomed over her life, she found solace with religion and a connection with god. According to Ward’s The Capsule of the Mind, Emily Dickinson wanted to escape from a routine and the presence of angels in her early poems suggested that she their brightness was her form of escape. (8) She experienced heartbreak of the worst kind and the power of death separated the two lovers. Dickinson had to battle the hardship of losing the one she loved. Her poetry of different stages of her life along with her short stories as well.