Lauren Kerstetter

So Much to Say About Emily

Emily Dickinson had mastered the art of studying the human

experience, isolating its constituents, and crafting their essence into

profoundly relatable poetry. A true artist. There is an intimacy to her

poetry. One feels as though by reading her work, they are intruding on

the private thoughts of another. Its like looking through the window of

a strangers home. One is curious about what lies within, and yet feels

apprehensive of what may be revealed, as her work fearlessly probes

disquieting themes such as death, madness, and sexuality.

Dickinsons unique punctuation and grammar is immediately

evident in her work. There seems a general disregard, possibly

contempt, for convention. Commas are replaced with dashes, and

where there ought not be a comma, Dickinson uses one anyway. This

stubborn punctuation has the effect of making the reader pause where

he or she may not have otherwise. One of the many examples of these

obligatory pauses can be found in the mere title of I heard a Fly buzz

when I died, as well as in several other places throughout the poem.

Lines 7 and 8 read, For that last onset when the King / Be witnessed

in the room While at first the pauses may seem excessive and

unnecessary, they serve to add emphasis to certain words and

phrases. when the King be witnessed is given greater weight when it

is isolated by dashes. The significance added by these pauses implies

that the King could be some divine entity, perhaps God coming to

claim the spirit of the departed.

Death is a theme regularly explored in Dickinsons poetry.

However, there is no trace of morbidity or hopelessness in the poems

focused on death. Rather, the unconventional attitude she conveys is

more one of acceptance, such as in Because I could not stop for

Death. In this poem, death is portrayed as a courtly gentleman who

kindly stops to offer a ride in his carriage. The commonplace but

serene imagery used in the poem adds to the idea that death is as

much a part of life as children playing at recess, fields of Gazing

Grain, and the Setting Sun. Her lines are void of anxiety and fear. In

other poems, death seems so ordinary that the speaker almost ignores

it. In I hard a Fly buzz when I died, the speaker is on their

deathbed, and yet the focus of their consciousness is not on death, but

on the fly disrupting the rooms stillness. Its strange, and yet it seems

natural. Its relatable.

Emily Dickinson is able to capture the discomfort that heavy

ideas such as death induce through the use of slant rhymes. Lines two

and four of The bustle in a House end with Death and Earth .

Here, with so chilling a topic, a slant rhyme is effectively unsettling.

With a slant rhyme, the ending of a line has a mildly off-putting flavor.

Reading them is like licking a chocolate ice cream cone only to find out
that its actually meatloaf flavored. Its unsatisfying and certainly not

what one anticipated. In I heard a Fly buzz when I died, Room is

coupled with Storm, and then firm with Room. Here, the slant

rhyme accurately produces the same kind of subtle disturbance made

by a noisy fly in a quiet room of mourners.

Emily Dickinson has a way of compressing great meaning into

very few words. In Much Madness is divinest Sense, she is able to

summarize group-mentality in society and the consequences of non-

conformity in a mere eight lines. Agree with the majority and be

accepted, dissent and be seen as an outsider, handled with a chain

like a beast to be feared. Likewise, in Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,

she is again able to capture a fundamental aspect of human nature in

eight short lines. Raw truth is often overwhelming, and so we must

filter it, dilute it, let it dazzle us gradually. Anyone can describe these

concepts, but Dickinson has the ability to make these widely

understood human experiences dance on the page. She endows truth

with the immense power of a lightning bolt. She shows the reader the

chains with which society binds non-conformists. All in just eight lines.

There is so much to say about Emily. Without her unparalleled

mastery of words it is impossible to touch upon all that she is able to

do in her work in so few pages. One could devote an entire essay to

her use of rhyme, or to one single theme, or to the ways in which she

manipulates language to suit her purposes. She has the power to

sequester the subtleties of the human experience and portray them in

a way that makes you give deeper thought to that which we regularly

feel and think and encounter, as only a true artist can.