niverse. Home thus reflects her inner landscape, which may be called her spatial landscape, a sensitivity to space dependent on both personal and social factors (Mudge 1).
The home and the elements that make up the home, including its garrets, chambers, rooms, corridors, doorways, and windows, project the form of the poet's mind and bring the reader closer to Dickinson's evolving sense of "place," as person and poet. Other images as well objectify her inner life, including all of her major concerns--self, family, love, loneliness, madness, renunciation, nature, God, death, immortality, eternity, and poetry itself:
The image of home, taken from the poet's prose as well as her poetry, becomes a small but forceful expression of the most significant aspects of he sensibility (Mudge 8).
Dickinson's dedication to home and the fact that she remained in her father's home her whole life has been part of the myth that has built up around her as a woman scorned and left to remember someone lost. In her biographies, there has been much concern with identifying the men she may have loved. The facts indicate that she loved one man late in her life and had experienced unrequited love for another in her young womanhood. The man she loved was Otis P. Lord, a close friend of her father and nineteen years older than she. After his wife died, they contemplated marriage, but Emily persisted in her poetry and her loneliness. It is considered likely that she had loved another man when she was young and that that love as well had been unrequited, perhaps because he was married. A number of candidates have been suggested, but it is less important who it was than that her feelings were expressed in her poetry (Ferlazzo 59-60).
Dickinson suggests in her poetry that love is a prism. This image first appears in poem 611:
With a prism, a narrow band of light passes through and breaks into bands of color. Emily argues that this image in t...