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 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 …