Emily Dickinson's Obsession with Death

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Emily Dickinson's Obsession with Death
Emily Dickinson is one of the most outstanding and prominent poets of American
Romanticism whose rather significant body of work employs themes and motifs
characteristic of the movement brushing them off with her unique treatment of visionary
nature. Her poetry revolves around several binary oppositions such as life and death, eternity
and immediacy, earthly and divine, body and soul that undergo various speculations for
Emily Dickinson approaches them as if she were an eye-witness, sometimes dragged into
transcendental states and later sharing her persona’s experiences with the reader. Three
poems of Emily Dickinson were chosen for the analysis, namely “Death is a dialogue
between…”, “Death sets a thing significant…”, and “Let down the bars, o Death!” which
explicitly state the purpose of the analysis: examining the concept of death and its
manifestation in works selected.
Working within romantic paradigm Emily Dickinson allows certain configurations
within common structural oppositions. Her poems reflect the struggle between metaphysical
and dialectical strategies of Weltanschauung. Taking into account these two propositions the
first inference comes into place: poetess chooses one conventional opposition which expands
upon the basis of two ambivalent notions and introduces the third member, which turns the
metaphysical contrastive pair into a dialectic triad.
Let us apply a close reading technique to the first poem. The opening lines of the
poem read: “Death is a dialogue between / The spirit and the dust”. To the limelight comes
classical binary opposition in structuralist sense – spirit::dust which is figuratively 
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immovable but adding the third element – Death – gives an impulse of eternal motion to the
pair, where the spirit becomes a thesis, the dust – an antithesis and Death is a synthesis which
signifies a passage from state to movement, from metaphysics to dialectics. The form of the
dialogue corresponds to the above discussed scheme, for it presupposes the exchange
between two entities and results in a movement of ideas in time and space, and Death is the
substance for this dialogue.
The dialogue captures two different realities, equal in their importance: the life itself
and the afterlife correspondingly where the Death is the personification of the latter. Death as
represented in collective unconscious is something rather inevitable when it puts its foot
down there is no way to fight it back. However, in the frame of the poem the Death is
haggling with the vital Spirit; even though it uses imperative mood: “Dissolve”, commands it,
the Spirit has a right to make a choice and parry with another blow: “Sir, I have another
trust”, which is a polysemantic word meaning either “belief”, “hope” or “reliability”. Either
way this synonymous range implies that there is a possibility of choice and nothing may force
the Spirit make it rather than itself.
Moreover, moving on to the next stanza another important discovery is to be made:
two different realities are clearly separated from one another and the margin is the ground
from which the Death speaks. Speaking in contemporary terms the Death is quite
discriminated because its word is underestimated and not to be taken seriously. The power of
the Death is of verbal quality only and, what is more, it is delineated by spatial restrictions –
the ground.
The poem here draws on two different modes of Weltanschauung – mythological and
religious. Mythological is represented by the personification of the Death and designation of
the place where its existence is possible; furthermore, three abstract notions taken in their full
gamut acquire human features and physical characteristics: they can speak and reveal the 
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work of the second signaling system; they can also make choices. Religious component
comes brightly into place by means of the last two lines of the poem: “Just laying off, for
evidence, / An overcoat of clay.” Clay is a Biblical material from which man was made; it is
also an evidence of the Divine Providence and a connection between human and his creator.
However, clay as a sign of origin is also a constant reminder of mortality and nothingness, so
the Spirit chooses to shake it off, to be free for good.
Mythological and religious modes thus come in appeasing symbiosis resulting in the
personification of death, restriction of its authority and such diminution comes from
substitution of the regular binary opposition with a triad of dialectics.
Yet another embodiment of death is found in Emily Dickinson’s poem “Death sets a
thing significant…” where it becomes clear, how powerful and categorical its imperatives
are. The opposition between life and death is vaguely represented by culturally accepted
images of the former and implicit presence of the latter and does not appea