Readers of the poetry of Emily Dickinson 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. 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, as can be seen in an examination of her poetry.
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 life. Dickinson's image of home is turned into an image of herself--her home is her world, and she has a perception of the architecture of the home that is akin to her perception of the architecture of the body. 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.
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 the poem shows energy passing through the experience of love, revealing a spectrum of possibilities. This often includes a spectrum of gender possibilities, and Dickinson often confused the issue by playing on a theme of androgynous or bisexual affection by interchanging "him" and "her" as objects...