Although the archaic scriptures of the Holy Bible are highly controversial and continue to be interpreted from countless perspectives, they are often found to be inspirations for several authors and poets. Emily Dickinson, an acclaimed poet of the 1800s, is one of these writers who have found incentive in passages of the Bible. In her poem, “Eden is that Old Fashioned House”, Dickinson limns the neoteric paradise, which we fail to find, in comparison to Adam and Eve’s experience in God’s Garden.
In the classic poem “Eden is that Old Fashioned House” by Emily Dickinson, the ostensible ennui of our everyday life is metaphorically represented as a hidden Eden.
God’s Garden of Eden is the legendary paradise, unsullied by corruption or maliciousness and in this poem Dickinson defines modern day Eden as what “we dwell in every day”. In every person’s mind his or her life needs improvement; since they have, with a lifetime of scrupulous deduction, reduced their current situation to undesirable waste. We search for perfection, Eden, in our imagination and in reality “without suspecting our abode”. It is a quiddity of human nature to seek flaws instead of exalting the good. This blind judgment destroys our only real paradise and we continue to criticize until we drive ourselves away. We stray away from this original happiness so far that we “discover it no more”. We need to embrace our surroundings, instead of ignoring them. The true meaning of an object is not perceived until it is gone. Humanity possesses their Garden of Eden within themselves, beneath the peripheral surface of their life.
The Genesis of the Holy Bible narrates the story of God’s creation of mankind in the Garden of Eden, the paralleled theme in Dickinson’s poem, “Eden is that Old-Fashioned House”. After creating the heavens and the earth, God modeled Adam after himself, thus “the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden (Genesis,2,15)”; as it had an...