I love,/ If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" (Ferlazzo 102). Here Whitman is expressing his belief in the cycle of nature and in his eternal relationship with all other things and people in nature, in life as well as in death. For Whitman, the great carnival of life is a never-ending source of vitality and pleasure.
For Dickinson, however, nature is a far darker medium. She is aligned with Whitman at least in terms of their both believing that nature has a power far greater than most human beings perceive, but she is quite unlike Whitman in her view of the essence of nature and of the relationship of the realm of nature and the realm of human beings:
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost (Ferlazzo 101).
Ferlazzo writes of the above, a stanza from Dickinson's poem beginning "What mystery pervades a well!":
The fifth stanza comes bluntly to the point that man and nature are strangers. Those poets and writers who claim to know nature and speak freely and often about it, Dickinson maintains, have never really gained admittance to nature's house nor analyzed its spirit; they are like the children . . . who mistake the outward-show of tent-raising for the actual circus (Ferlazzo 101-102).
Dickinson views life as she views death--as a contemplative who always believes that there is much more to the subject, to life, to death, to nature, to love, than meets the eye. There is always a darker aspect to be considered in all things, in Dickinson's poetic world, and she sees her role in life as one who is bound to contemplate those deeper aspects and report what she has found to the world. Dickson's life is remarkable mainly for its lack of remarkability, at least in external terms:
Here she lived a life, outwardly uneventful, inwardly dedicated to a secret and self-imposed assignment--the mission of writing a "letter to the world" that would express, in poems of absolute ...