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Emily Dickinson

March 7th, 2007 by alexh

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. She went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley. She only attended this school for one year, when she returned home. She remained here for the rest of her life and rarely left. She also had very few visitors. When she did have guests they greatly impacted her poetry. On a trip to Philadelphia, she met a Reverend Charles. He visited her home and then left her for the West Coast. Many critics believe that this is what caused her increase in her heartsick poetry. Though he was an important person in her life, some doubt that he was really her love. Other possibilities for her love in her poems are Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican. She lived in isolation from the world outside. She spent a lot of time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, her brother Austin, and her younger sister Lavinia. She admired both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats. She died in Amherst in 1886. After she died her family found forty hand bound volumes, containing more than eight hundred of her poems. All in all, her works were not acknowledged while she was still alive.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –

I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –

Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –

The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –

There’s Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –
A sort they call “Despair” –
There’s Banishment from native Eyes –
In Sight of Native Air –

And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –

To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they’re mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like My Own –

The Reason that chose this poem is because I feel that when people are in pain or are very sad, they tend to forget that other people are going through the same things. They also try to compare someone else’s pain against their own. They say that nobody knows what it feels like and that nobody can help. I know that I can get like this at times and I am trying to break that habit, because if you only think about your own pain, you aren’t there when your friends or family really need you. In this poem she uses personification when she talks about her grief. She also has a rhythm and repetition but she does not use any similes or metaphors.

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