Emily Dickinson's attitude towards immortality

Emily Dickinson's attitude towards immortality

Dickinson was preoccupied with the questions of death and immortality. She was inquisitive about any and her perplexity about it caused her poetic tension. The questions of belief and doubt centering around immortality are prominent in her poetry. She desired immortality. wished that the soul never changed, yet she denied the orthodox of Paradise. (However, 'her confidence that love was an enduring entity supported her hope of immortality.

She might have been in doubt sometimes that death was the gateway to immortality, but she firmly believed that the soul's identity could never be loc She seems to have surveyed every domain Of immortality and examined its relations •p with death and life.

Dickinson's early poems depict the progress of her belief from life to death. It was like a voyage from inland to the sea. How many times these low feet staggered" descr is the picture of an amazingly still body of a once-busy domestic woman with a kind of tender irony. The coolness of this poem gives way to hot pain which only Christ in Heaven will be able to sit.

We find in her poem 193, Christ the teacher will explain "I" the pupil the reason for his suffering, in the lovely schoolroom of Heaven. "l felt a Funeral in my Brain" verges" the expression of her feelings which are akin to madness.

In some of her poems, Dickinson asserts her firm faith in the immortality of the soul. "Two lengths have every day" logically argues that the identity of the soul cannot be lost because it is immortal. The soul not only perceives an object realistically but creates imaginatively its full image.

The final stanza of the poem asserts that death will not be able to destroy the soul. It will not even chånge its identity because man's individUal consciousness will guide his journey to immortality.

In the poem "The world is not conclusion" the most typical approach to the problem of immortality is perceived. It explores the perplexing inability of philosophers, scholars, and saints, to adequately prove the truth of immortality. It also satirizes the gestures of religion towards the immortality of the soul. Dickinson asserts her belief:

This world is not conclusion

A species stands beyond—

Invisible, as Music—

But positive as sound.-

It beckons, as it baffles—

The vision of immortality is best upheld in the poem "Behind me dips eternity". Here she gives a graphic description of her existence between death and immortality. Eternity dips behind her, and immortality extends before her. he iS in between, and death appears as a drift in the grey eastern horizon and dissolves into dawn far away before the beginning of the west.

The earthly vision of immortality's haunting reality is described in "I taste a Liquor never brewed". It expresses through a drinking metaphor, the ecstasy that accompanies a revelation. The poet is intoxicated with the air and is a debauchee of dew. Angels and saints go to the windows to see her leaning against the sun, her lamp-post.

Dickinson has examined the question of immortality from different points of view. Her keen interest and sincerity are evident in the intensity of her expressions.