Emily Dickenson and Death

I don’t particularly enjoy poetry. I like the rhymey poetry, but not so much the free verse, because I can never seem to get much out of it. I just like straightforward words, although I do enjoy metaphors and symbolism. I really dislike writing poetry also. It’s just a pain in the rear. I get nothing out of it. I’d rather write real sentences and stories than a poem about nature. Even though I don’t naturally enjoy poetry, I do like Emily Dickinson. I’ve read some of her poems before and some of them are quite beautiful.

The few poems of Emily Dickinson that caught my eye today were her two poems about death. They were actually kind of morbid, but in a real life situation kind of way. The first one which starts with “Because I could not stop for Death –“ (p.1214). Reminded me of the story in Harry Potter of the three hallows and the brothers who met death while walking over a bridge they had made with magic. The poem has that kind of mentality. The narrator met death, who was in no hurry and death took the narrator on a journey.

The second poem that interested me is the poem that starts with “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (p. 1215). She lay on her deathbed and there was silence when she heard a fly buzz. She signed a will and then “the windows failed”, windows being her eyes and she died. This is a particularly morbid poem. However, I am not a very morbid person. Lately in my life, there has been a lot of sickness and near death experiences for people close to me that I have been thinking about it lately and this poem was a little unusual to me in that the room is silent when the narrator takes her last breath and all that is heard in the room is a fly and then she dies, the end. I don’t really see any moral or message in it. I feel like a lot of these poems she is writing are kind of just scribbles or sketches in a notebook, if you will. However, they are incredible.