Emily Dickenson's Poetry Essay

Emily Dickinson’s poetry came deep from her personal experiences, life, and feelings. She used her life as a painter would use a palate of colors to pain a canvas. Dickinson wrote about a wide assortment of topics, for example, death, love, religion, beauty, and nature. Her use of metaphors, unusual capitalization, and abstract language helps define Dickinson as a writer and a transcendentalist. However her transcendentalist-like poems only appear when she discusses nature, not necessarily when she primarily discusses death and eternity or emotions. In poem number 314, Dickinson describes how “After great pain, a formal feeling comes--/ The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--/ The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,/ And Yesterday, or Centuries before” (Dickinson, 218)? She explains how humans feel when someone they know dies and, continuing on in the poem, she discusses how eternity does not necessarily mean eternally living, but entering the afterlife and heaven.
While Dickinson discusses the mournful topic of death, she also writes about relationships and love. She mentions the feeling that is love and how love can be brought out when people are together, but she also writes about her longing for love. She explains, in poem 640 on page 222, how she cannot love because of religion: “Nor could I raise—with You--/ Because Your Face/Would put our Jesus’--/ That New Grace/… So We must meet apart--/ You there—I—here--” (Dickinson, 223-4). Connecting this thought of religion to her other poems, Emily discusses how she must always be faithful and true to her religion. To connect her religion to beauty, she discusses God and how the world is his creation, and how there is so much beauty within it.
When Dickinson discusses beauty in her poems, she emphasizes that natural beauty is paramount. What God creates is beautiful and He created the world and everyone in it. Therefore, natural beauty and what beauty God has given the world and everyone in it is...