Her immediate family was probably the most important people in Dickinson’s life. Her father, Edward Dickinson (1803-1874), a graduate of Yale law school and was a successful lawyer. He was portrayed as a man of unbending demeanor, and rectitude with a softer side that he struggled to conceal. It came out in incidents of pleasure in nature, kindliness to people, and the embarrassed desire for more intimacy with his children than he ever allowed himself. Dickinson expressed her distress over his death in many poems and letters. It is believed that he appears in some of her poems about deprivations and about explosive behaviour. A clear picture of Dickinson’s mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson (1804-1882), is difficult to interpret. She seemed to have been dignified, conventional, reasonably intelligent, and probably subservient to her husband. She suffered periods of poor health, probably of emotional origin, and her health was shattered by her husband’s death. Dickinson and her sister, Lavinia, cared for her as an invalid for the last four years of her life, during which Dickinson’s affection for her greatly increased.
Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia (1833-1899) and brother Austin (1823-1895), were close to her all her life. Lavinia was a vivacious, pretty, and clever girl who seemed to have rejected several offers of marriage, possibly in order to remain Dickinson’s lifelong companion. Protective of her elder sister, she tried to shield the ever more exclusive Dickinson, and she may have understood Dickinson need to have time and privacy for her poems. Her brother, Austin, married a close friend of Dickinson’s, Susan Gilbert. Their relationship remained highly ambivalent and Dickinson wrote warm and revealing letters and poems to Susan but seemed to have been disillusioned with her. The death of Gilbert Dickinson (1875-1883), Austin and Susan’s youngest child, was a terrible loss for Dickinson.
During the 1850s, Dickinson made the most of her travels outside Amherst, visiting Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, but she was becoming more reclusive; she stopped attending church services and spent much of her time writing poems. Towards the end of the decade, Dickinson seemed to be approaching several emotional crises. Her emotional crises of the early 1860s may have stem from her fear about the condition of her eyes, fears for her sanity in connection with these difficulties and with family instabilities, or a combination of love desperation with all of these frustrations. She may have also been desperate because no one could recognize her poetic gifts. Her increasing reclusiveness and her continually wearing white dresses may be chiefly related to the idea that in spirit she was married to someone; this may suggest that in addition to all the conflicts, there was a need for time and privacy for her writing and an increasing conviction that she derived more satisfaction from living in the world of her poems than in ordinary society. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge that her writing served as an emotional catharsis and as a healing therapy for her, which contributes to its appeal.
During Emily Dickinson’s lifetime, only seven of her poems appeared in print; all unsigned and altered and damaged by editors and five of these poems appeared in Bowles “Springfield Republication”. Dickinson’s life revolved around her correspondence, her poetry and her household duties. She remained a faithful daughter and sister, and a faithful friend to many whom she related through letters. Dickinson insisted that she did not suffer from isolation and that she felt deeply fulfilled and in intimate contact with the world. It is evident that she wanted to make her relatives proud of her work after she died, and her combination of pride and resignation probably stemmed through her great gift and her frustration that so many people were mystified by her poems. Many of her poems give eloquent testimony that she longed for audience and as luck would have it, her poems survived. But their struggle for adequate publication, understanding, and recognition almost parallels her inner life in its complexity.
Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in short stanzas, mostly quatrains, with short lines, usually rhyming only on the second and fourth lines. Other stanzas employ pairs of couplets or triplets, and a few poems employ more complicated stanzas. A large number of Dickinson’s rhymes are partial, slant, or off-rhymes, some of these to be barely recognizable. Also, iambic rhymes dominate, but they are varied, speeded and slowed, in many ways. The most striking signature of Dickinson’s style is the blending of homely and exalted images, metaphors, and scenes in her poems. Her metaphors incorporate elements so condensed that one must “dig deep” to reveal the full structure of an idea or picture. And according to Dickinson herself, the speaker in her poems is not herself but a supposed person.
Life in a small New England town in Dickinson’s time contained a high mortality rate for young people; there were frequent death-scenes in homes, and as a result, this factor contributed to her preoccupation with death, as well as her withdrawal from the world, her anguish over her lack of romantic love, and her doubts about fulfillment beyond the grave. Even a modest selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems reveals that death is her principal subject; and her interest in death was often criticized as being morbid. “Because I could not stop for Death” (712) is Emily Dickinson’s most anthologized and discussed poem. The speaker personifies death as a polite and considerate person who takes her in a carriage for a journey “toward eternity” (line 24). The first stanza presents an apparently cheerful view of a grim subject. She begins her journey with Death who takes her along to the carriage “the carriage held but just ourselves” (line 3). Death is kindly; he comes in a vehicle indicating respect or courtship, and he is accompanied by immortality. With the use of the term “immortality” (line 4), the poet shows that at the beginning of the journey the speaker is young and enthusiastic to tell about her existence of life in the world and that she cannot think of dying. In the second stanza, Death drives her so well; unhurriedly “we slowly drove, he knew no haste” (line 5). This indicates that Death knows no haste because he always has enough power and time. The speaker now acknowledges that she has put her “labour” (her struggle) and “leisure” (her freedom) aside (line 6). She has given up her claims on life and seems pleased with her exchange of life for death’s “civility” (line 8). The third stanza creates a sense of motion and of the separation between the living and the death. The poem signifies the three general stages of life: childhood represented by “children strove”
(line 9), youth represented by “the fields of Gazing Grains” (line 11) and the end of the life symbolized by “the Setting Sun” (line 12). Children go on with life’s conflicts, which are now irrelevant to the dead woman. The vitality of nature which is embodied in the grain and the sun is also irrelevant to her state; it makes a frightening contrast. However, in the fourth stanza, she becomes troubled by her separation from nature and by what seems to be a physical threat. The first line “Or rather, he passed us” (line 13) demonstrates that the speaker realizes that the sun is passing them rather than they the sun, suggesting both that she has lost the power of independent movement, and that time is leaving her behind. Lines three and four in this stanza illustrate the reason for coldness. The speaker is attired in a light gown “Gown” (line 15) and “Tippet” made of “Tulle” (line 16), which is a kind of thin, transparent, open material. With this kind of dress, she figures out that she is dead. In the fifth stanza, the poem’s speaker reaches Death’s home represented by the word “house”. The speaker views her own grave “a swelling of the ground” (line 18). Third and fourth lines in this stanza “The roof was scarcely visible, the cornice but a mound” (line 19-20) emphasizes that she is buried in the earth. The words of the final stanza such as “surmised” (line 23) and “toward eternity” (line 24) make it understandable that she is in a shocking situation at the end of her journey. It dawns on her that her journey is towards endless death: “the horses’ heads/ were toward eternity" (line 23-24).
Emily Dickinson uses a conflict relationship between reality and the speaker’s thought. At first, the speaker cannot realize that she has died. From the carriage, she sees her childhood, her youth, and then her final years. The overall tone of this poem seems mixed. It seems that Dickinson changes the tone along with the stanzas. In the first three stanzas, the tone is joyous and happy. In the fourth stanza, the tone seems to be contemplative; the speaker is confused about her existence in the world. However, in the last two stanzas, Dickinson uses a sad tone; the speaker perceives the reality, and becomes calm when she realizes her destiny.
There is a blend of love and friendship in a few of Dickinson’s poems. Many of which are written about dear people who seem to be regarded more as beloved friends than as objects of romantic ardor. “I cannot live with You” (640) is probably her most popular poem of this theme. The speaker addresses a beloved man from whom she is permanently separated in life. “To live with him would be life” implies that she is dead without him. The only life together possible for them will be when they are in the grave. She uses the metaphor of life as porcelain locked up by the sexton who is a church official whose duties include maintaining church property, digging graves, and ringing the church bells. She refers to being together in this world as "our life,"
(line 7) a life locked up, not free, without passion or expression. In the third stanza, the speaker imagines death scenes in which she would prefer to comfort her dying lover rather than to die with him. She is also reluctant to die with him because that would give her the horrible shock of seeing her lover as Jesus and heaven itself. The lover is like God, and love is superior to heaven. For two stanzas, beginning with “They’d judge us-How” (line 29) the speaker’s attention moves to the unconventional nature of her love. The speaker’s desperation now threatens the poem’s coherence. The last stanza does not connect logically to what precedes it. The poem seems to return to the world of the living, and it seems to be saying that the lovers’ complicated prospects and perhaps their shocking unconventionality make the future so uncertain that they can depend on only the small sustenance of their present narrow communication and tortured hopes. The short lines and abruptly rocking movement of the poem echo their struggles.
Dickinson’s poems are often difficult because of their unusual compression, unconventional grammar, their strange diction and figures of speech, and their often generalized symbolism and allegory. The speaker in these individual poems is often hard to identify. Furthermore, her condensed style and monotonous rhymes make sustained reading of her work difficult. Perhaps most important for understanding Emily Dickinson is the testing of one’s conceptions of the tone or tones of individual poems and relating them to other poems and to one’s emotional ideas and feelings.
Bibliography
Cody, John. After Great Pain: The inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Gelpi, Albert J. Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Cambridge, Mass: University Press, 1955.
_______________. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963.
Weisbuch, Robert. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Whicher, George F. This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939.
academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/stop
www.cswnet.com/~erin/ed14.htm
www.biographyonline.net/poets/emily_dickinson.html