EMILY DICKINSON AND LOVE POEMS.
For all the many short poems about love- usually unrequited and meant to be seen as a lonely person trying to reach out, Miss Dickinson never married., In fact, she hardly ever left her father's house and saw practically no one. Since she was a preacher's daughter the idea and ideal of God was evident in a number of her poems. Perhaps it is this biographical fact that give astonishing sadness and passion that would never really be answered in her love poems.
One example, a heartbreaking one, is "You left me, sweet, two legacies". She calls these two legacies "A legacy of love a Heavenly Father would content Had He the offer of. You left me boundaries of pain Capacious as the sea" (Dickinson l 1-6). If one examines her rather lonely and inner-directed life, despite supposedly having several affairs, this short poem reveals how little she knows about actual love, and how much she understands the pain of not being part of a loving relationship. This particular poem is not a crying out, merely a sob. It tells us a lot about the woman and her thoughts, her fears, and her deprivation of something every woman wants and needs.
From this same set of love poems, there is "I hide myself within my flower". Here, in simple words, is a case of a woman feeling less like a fully-developed woman and more like an object, the "flower That wearing on your breast, you, unsuspecting, wear me, too" (Dickinson l 1-3). She is describing how she wants to cling, like a boutonniere, to a man who would see her as something more than an appendage to his lapel. It is another sad commentary on how desperately she wants and needs affection and how little she has won any.
Her simply not comprehending what a deep and meaningful relationship would be- a sort of equal partnership, is expressed when she writes: "IO cannot live with you, It would be life, And life is over there Behind the shelf" (l รป ...