An Analysis of the Themes of Emily Dickinson’s Poems

孟言

Abstract：In the whole life of Emily Dickinson， She wrote more than eighteen hundred poems， while more than six hundred poems were focusing on the theme of death and more than three hundred poems on the theme of love. This paper mainly introduces the main themes of her poems to illuminate the charm of Emily Dickinsons beautiful poems.

Key words： Emily Dickinson， theme poem

中图分类号：I712      文献标识码：A        文章编号：1005-5312（2016）27-0064-01

一、Introduction

Emily Dickinsons poem was famous for its own style. She wrote poems in compliance with her own “rule” different from the traditional form and intended to seek the way of expressing her own ideas and feelings， especially the inner world. No title （her poems were often titled with the first sentence of her poem）， large use of dashes and vast capital letters were considered as the most outstanding rules. The content of Dickinsons poetry was very extensive mainly concerning about the traditional literary themes， such as death， eternity， love and nature etc. What her poetry is strongly paid attention to is her largely utilizing metaphors， images and the strategy of “circumference”. Due to her unique style， some of them were even called riddles. For a long time， researches of Emily Dickinsons poetry have been hot issues， and thus many annotations of the themes of her poetry emerged in large numbers.

二、Analysis of the themes of her poems

The major themes in her poems are death， eternity， love and nature etc. Emily Dickinson had many miserable life experiences that influenced her poetry and caused her to pay great attention to write the death theme. She wrote more than eighteen hundred poems all her life， there are more than six hundred poems focusing on the theme of death and more than three hundred poems on the theme of love. She preferred writing about death in particular ways such as death as being eternal and continuous but also immortality as a state of consciousness in an eternal present and could be seen in her poems such as the 712th poem “Because I could not stop for Death”， the 465th “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died”， and the 449th “I died for Beauty-but was scarce”. “Death” and “eternity” is the eternal topic of Dickinsons poetry. Dickinsons 1162th poetry defined life： “Our life is great / we have seen already through life / life is infinite.” Death is horrible， but should not be a threat of human hearts; human beings should love life as deep as love death， because death is part of life.

Also some of them related to love such as the 322nd one， the 586th one and the 732nd poem etc. The relationship between Dickinson and his parents were not close， and she turned to nature to get parental love. Of her many poems， nature poems give special scrutiny. Nature appeared widely and frequently in her works. Nature was usually like the bright and dark mystery to her， only occasionally illuminated by flashes of pantheism and sometimes darkened by hopeless fatality. The evidence of her treatment of nature can be found in all her subjects. Dickinson saw nature as benevolent but cruel and perhaps destructive.

三、Conclusion

Because of the main themes， love， death， eternity， religion and nature etc， in literature represented in her poems， she was honored as “the greatest and most creative poetess”. On the part of the mastery of language， some literary critics think that Emily Dickinson can parallel with William Shakespeare.

References：

[1]Whicher， G. F. This Was a Poet， A Critical Biog2raphy of Emily Dickinson [M]. N.Y.： Scribners， 1938.

[2]杨桂缘.艾米莉.狄金森的死亡意识解读[J].名作欣赏，2003（01）.