Emily Dickinson: On Death and Eternity

Emily Dickinson:

                Much of Dickinson’s poetry deals with the theme of death. In many of her poems, death is seen as something that is simply part of nature. It is neither good nor evil, it simply is, and therefore should not be feared. In one poem, she discusses how as a little child she thought death was the door into immortality but as she grew older realized that death was only cold and led only to a sort of oblivion. In other poems, death may allow for some sort of person hood to remain, but this is not quite clear. Many of her poems about death have pantheistic connotations and undertones. Often what enables people to have some kind of person hood after death is when others remember the ideas they died for, or at least this is an idea one of her poems hints at. She never really treats death as something to be feared or dreaded. It simply is. This clashes with the idea found in the Bible that death is not normal, not how things are supposed to be. Christ has removed the sting of death by defeating it, so we need not fear death. But there is Heaven. It is not a strange nothingness we enter into, but rather it is either eternal life or damnation.  Dickinson says don’t fear death because it is part of nature. God sees death as evil, something to be defeated, and Christians need not fear it because Christ has defeated it.  While we can enjoy the beauty of her poetry, we need to make sure that we do not inadvertently pick up the pantheistic thinking found in her poems, or forget that death is not how things were meant to be. While it is part of the world we live in now, it is a result of the Fall, and therefore an evil that has been conquered by Christ.