Dickinson and Her Religion

Dickinson and her Religion

Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest woman poets. She left us with numerous works that show us her secluded world. Like other major artists of nineteenth-century American introspection such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, Dickinson makes poetic use of her vacillations between doubt and faith. The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the meter of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language.

Dickinson’s Christian education affected her profoundly, and her desire for a human intuitive faith motivates and enlivens her poetry. Yet what she has faith in tends to be left undefined because she assumes that it is unknowable. There are many unknown subjects in her poetry among them: Death and the afterlife, God, nature, artistic and poetic inspiration, one’s own mind, and other human beings.

Dickinson was educated in a traditionally Protestant, provincial community and in a religious conservative schools and churches in Amherst and South Hadley. This affected Dickinson as a poet of religious concern, stimulating her to opposition as well as reverence. The Calvinist God she was taught to worship was an arbitrary God of absolute power. She struggles prodigiously in her writing against such an image of God, but also invokes it normally.

Emily Dickinson’s imagination is dynamic partly because she thinks of her mental world as always in flux and prefers not to adhere for long to any preconceived religious of philosophical doctrine. At different times she advances opposed positions on such central questions as the goodness of God, the reality of heaven, or the presence of the divine in nature. As a child of her culture, the fixed positions of her local Calvinism are inscribed in her mind and heart, while at the same time she distrusts them and seeks an alternative faith that will be truer to her moral conceptions. Since she takes different positions on religious questions, it has proved hard for commentators to summarize her religious perspective.

At the start of her career she assembles her poems in fascicles and sets, thus giving them a separate existence as poems, while later she experiments increasingly with a style of letter writing in which the border between verse and prose tends to disappear, and she writes poetically wherever she wants to (Martin). More and more she seems to conceive of poetic writing as an all-engaging process with only temporary closure. In addition, Dickinson’s poetry changes with the variation of her personal experience. In spite of her withdrawal from society and the persistence of her themes and preoccupations, her work not only circles back on itself but also reflects her intense response to personal changes that encroach on her world.

Her very early poems (1858-60) are generally smoother in form, sprightlier and less troubled in spirit than the prodigious group of poems assigned to her most productive years (1861-65) (Anderson). These are years of apparent crisis and of profound poetic inventiveness, when Dickinson composes many poems with dramatized speakers who anxiously explore religious questions as these affect their own happiness. In the last years she turns her writing concerning God, nature as God’s creation, relation between flesh and spirit, and the afterlife, often expressed in condensed and elliptical verse.

Early work that displays her preoccupation with divinity in nature is Poem 155 “The Murmur of a Bee…”. This is one of the early Dickinson’s songs of innocence, with its biblical resonance of idiom, its deliberate simplicity and sentiment, and its projection of a landscape where one encounters God as a friend (Duchac). The speaker assumes the wondering openness of a child and invokes God in whom she confides without hesitation, Her confiding generosity is what makes the poem work, along with its metrical subtlety, especially in the last stanza, where the modulation of open half-rhymes intimates the presence of the sophisticated