Emily Dickinson

Essay by Nelly25mattHigh School, 11th gradeA+, May 2005

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All-American Poet

Emily Dickinson is the best-known female poet of the English language, and also one of the leading authors in American literature. She was born in 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts where she lived a very unusual life. She hardly ever left her house and she confined herself to her room to live in privacy. While in her room, Dickinson created over seventeen hundred pieces of poetry. Her poems are a passionate representation of how she felt and what her life was like. She put all of her heart and soul into her poetry. Her poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want. Some themes she incorporates into her poetry are death, God, and nature.

In the poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" Dickinson opens up the scene in a very casual type of manner. She says that death came to pick her up in a carriage and "The Carriage held but just Ourselves/And Immortality" ("Death" 3-4).

This shows that death is just as common as taking a carriage ride with a friend rather than being a horrific nightmare with a great amount of pain.

Dickinson also describes her time with death by saying "We slowly drove - He knew no haste"("Death" 5). This shows that death just took his time and didn't just come and take her and it was done. Instead he picked her up and they're simply going on a carriage ride through eternity. While she is going on the ride with death she says "I had put away/My labor and my leisure too,/ For His Civility" ("Death" 5-9). This shows that she just forgot about what had happened and what she was used to from her past life and just allowed death to...