Major Themes of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

  

Introduction

In the modern poetic world of America Emily Dickinson plays a significant and multifarious role which makes her different from contemporary modern poets. She wrote poetry of great power questioning the nature of death and immortality. Emily Dickinson is remembered for her unique poetry. Dickinson wrote from life experience and her deepest thoughts and for herself as a way of letting out her feelings. Emily Dickinson as a poet deals with various themes such as nature, love, pain and sufferings, death and immortality, God and religion, artistic philosophy, universality and so on. Thus the range of themes in her poetry is very wide. Actually she goes through the depth of humane psyche to the profundity of nature. 

Theme of Nature

Emily Dickinson feels the necessity and profundity of nature. It plays an important role to make her poetic theme glorious and age-worthy. To her nature is extremely harmonious. It is an image of human. She considers nature as the gentlest mother as she finds mother like love amidst nature. Nature is the source of joy and beauty, the beauty of that nature holds up is in the beholders' perspective.

Actually we cannot refuse Emily Dickinson's actual fascination to nature specially in her poem " A Bird come down the walk" and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"

Theme of Love 

Emily Dickinson’s treatment of love shows her as a representative figure in the field of love and emotion. Her love poems are psychological as well as autobiographical. Love is a mystic life force it should be free from voluptuousness. Her poems run the range from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion; they are generally intense. 

"If you were coming in the fall" 

"I cannot live with you" 

"I early took my dog" 

 "Wild nights! Wild nights!" 

Theme of Death 

Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. No two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing, sometimes simply inevitable. In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” Dickinson investigates the physical process of dying. In “Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she personifies death, and presents the process of dying as simply the realization that there is eternal life. Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is ambivalent; death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on humanity by God, a welcome relief, and a blessed way to heaven. Immortality is often related to death. 

"I heard a fly buzz when I died"

"Because I could not stop for Death"

 "Safe in their alabaster chambers" 

"I died for beauty, but was scarce" 

Theme of Immortality 

 Immortality have covered an important place in her poetic world. Emily Dickinson says death functions as a connecting link between life and immortality. The conventional idea of immortality, with its insistence upon splendor and a majestic transformation, is in her poem uniquely reworked to present her belief in the reality of the soul after death.   

 Theme of Pain and Sufferings

The theme of pain and sufferings is also an organic part of her poetic theme. Actually, Emily Dickinson is a poet of universal grief whose poetic feelings goes on with the stream of eternal sufferings. Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or other positive value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of ecstasy and makes joy more vital. The pain of loss or of lacking/not having enhances our appreciation of victory, success, etc.; the pain of separation indicates the degree of our desire for union, whether with another human being or God. Food imagery is associated with this theme; hunger and thirst are the prerequisites for comprehending the value of food and drink.

"Pain has an element of blank"

"Success is counted sweetest" 

"After great pain a formal feeling comes" 

"I measure every grief I meet" 

"I had been hungry all the years" 

"My life closed twice before its close" 

Theme of God and Religion 

Man's relationship to God and nature is concerned throughout Dickinson's life.

Her attitude toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent, at other times cruel. 

"He fumbles at your spirit" 

"Heaven is what I cannot reach!" 

"The heart asks pleasure first" 

Conclusion 

So the final assessment goes in favor of Emily Dickinson that she transcends her poetic range to make her immortal and universal. Her universe is the universe of all people. Her poetry shows her personal confession through better experience. Then we can call her greatest as a modern poet. Emily Dickinson is totally a perfect poet who express her deepest thoughts under the guise of various themes.