Emily Dickinson and Death

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Emily Dickinson, as an individual and as a poet, deployed the poetic devices of point of view, tone, and metaphor, in order to convince her readers, and perhaps herself, that death was merely another mode of existence and, therefore, not something to dread. It looks at how, through a review of the poems ?I Heard a Fly Buzz? and ?I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,? it explores how she portrays death as another world and state of being, rather than as a termination.

From the Paper:

"?I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,? similarly ends with an unfinished line, conveying the transported corpse's final descent into the grave, but never reaching the bottom of the ground. This poem's cool tone is equally pronounced as the poem about the fly's buzz, and is even more shocking in its observed "plot" as the speaker of the poem takes the reader through her funeral and the decent into her own grave. As the funeral takes place, beginning first in her brain with the sight of mourners, she, as she sinks into the earth, does not express fear or horror at being buried alive but rather, she accepts what happens,? And hit a World, at every plunge,? observing her entrance into something not fully describable, because it is so different from what she has left."

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