ON BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH(2)
Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual
writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and
ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors
of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings
on the significance of literature, music, and art.
Emily Dickinson enjoys the King James Version of the Bible, as well
as authors such as English WRTERS William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles
Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle.
Dickinson’s early style shows the strong influence of William Shakespeare,
Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John
Keats and George Herbert. And Dickinson read Emerson appreciatively, who
became a pervasive and, in a sense, formative influence over her. As George
F. Whicher notes, "Her sole function was to test the Transcendentalist
ethic in its application to the inner life".
1“death” in Emily Dickinson’s poets
For as long as history has been recorded and probably for much longer,
man has always been different idea of his own death. Even those of us who
have accepted death graciously, have at least in some way, --- feared,
dreaded, or attempted to delay its arrival. We have personified death--
as an evildoer dressed in all black, its presence swoops down upon us and
chokes the life from us as though it were some street murder with malicious
intent. But in reality, we know that death is not the chaotic grim reaper
of fairy tales and mythology. Rather than being a cruel and unfair prankster
of evil, death is
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