Essay Database

Emily Dickinson thoroughly explores every aspect of death in her poetry. She considers the physical, the psychological and the emotional aspects of this unknowable experience. She looks at death from the perspective of both the living and the dying, even imagining her own death. In 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain' it is as though she is observing her death, and in 'I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -' she captures …

…she indicates that some form of life continues into eternity after death, there is no sense of the Christian afterlife of heaven or hell that would have been heavily believed upon in Dickinson's time. Even though Dickinson portrays a positive idea that death is not the absolute end, I think that there is still some sadness in the fact there is a sense of loss of the vibrancy of life suggested in the third stanza.