Emily Dickinson's Inner Life

Readers of the poetry of Emily Dickinson over the years have had several different images of the poet in mind, with perhaps the primary one being the "New England Nun," a version of her life which sees her as a heroic virgin who lived behind the walls of her father's house and renounced the world in order to nurture in sorrow the higher and purer love of someone who was absent forever. This images sees the woman opening her heart through her poetry. Thwarted love has been the central issue in the legend surrounding her, and her deeper feelings are manifested in her poetry through her love of nature and children. This image has been described as follows:

Trapped by an era considered intellectually dogmatic and emotionally limited, the poet triumphs through her writing, which outlives the age and proves to be timeless. The poet enters the popular consciousness as a symbol of all natural but hidden genius, and of all the love that is denied freedom (Ferlazzo 13).

Much of this image is a myth, but the power of her poetry to convey emotions and a special sense of love and loss is not. An examination of her life and poetry will show how she treats the subject of love and how she views the emotion and then conveys her perception in her work.

Much of the myth of Emily Dickinson centers on the fact that she lived most of her life in one house, and the concept of home is central in her work and is also embodied with her ideas of love, love for family, love for nature, love for

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sharing in the thought processes that developed it. They also heighten the urgency in the voice of the poet's persona, as if the narrator were indeed willing to give anything to find the love she seeks at this very moment. The poet uses the language of business in later passages, as if she were speaking only of worldly goods, but this seems to belie the urgency of the opening passages which instead points to her willingness to do anything she can personally to achieve her end (Ferlazzo 66-67). The same longing is expressed more tightly in "If you were coming in the Fall," a poem in which in each of the first four stanzas, the poet considers larger periods of time and argues that her sense of emptiness would be bearable if reunion could be achieved after any one of them: If you were coming in the Fall, I'd brush the Summer by With half a smile, and half a spurn, As Housewives do, a Fly (511). After examining this possibility, though, the poet gives in to a sense of despair at ever being reunited with her love at all: But now, uncertain of the length Of this, that is between, It goads me, like the Goblin Bee-- That will not state--its sting (511). When lovers do meet, that meeting may be all too fleeting, as in "

Category: Literature - E