Emily Dickinsons poetry

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes
The Individuals Struggle with God

Dickinson devoted a great amount of her work to exploring the relationship between an
individual and a Judeo-Christian God. Many poems describe a protracted rebellion against the
God whom she deemed scornful and indifferent to human suffering, a divine being perpetually
committed to subjugating human identity. In a sense, she was a religious poet. Unlike other
religious poets, who inevitably saw themselves as subordinate to God, Dickinson rejected this
premise in her poetry. She was dissatisfied with the notion that the poet can engage with God
only insofar as God ordains the poet as his instrument, and she challenged Gods dominion
throughout her life, refusing to submit to his divine will at the cost of her self. Perhaps her most
fiery challenge comes in Mine by the Right of the White Election! (528), in which the speaker
roars in revolt against God, claiming the earth and heavens for herself or himself.
Elsewhere, Dickinsons poetry criticizes God not by speaking out directly against him, but by
detailing the suffering he causes and his various affronts to an individuals sense of self. Though
the speaker of Tell all the Truth but tell it slant (1129) never mentions God, the poem refers
obliquely to his suppression of the apostle Paul in the last two lines. Here, the speaker describes
how unmitigated truth (in the form of light) causes blindness. In the Bible (Acts 9:4), God
decides to enlighten Paul by making him blind and then healing him on the condition that
thenceforth Paul becomes a chosen vessel of God, performing his will. The speaker recoils
from this instance of Gods juggernaut-like domination of Paul in this poem but follows the
poems advice and tells the truth slant, or indirectly, rather than censuring God directly. In
another instance of implicit criticism, Dickinson portrays God as a murderous hunter of man in
My Life had stooda Loaded Gun (754), in which Death goes about gleefully executing
people for his divine master. These poems are among the hundreds of verses in which Dickinson
portrays God as aloof, cruel, invasive, insensitive, or vindictive.
The Assertion of the Self

In her work, Dickinson asserts the importance of the self, a theme closely related to Dickinsons
censure of God. As Dickinson understood it, the mere act of speaking or writing is an affirmation
of the will, and the call of the poet, in particular, is the call to explore and express the self to
others. For Dickinson, the self entails an understanding of identity according to the way it
systematizes its perceptions of the world, forms its goals and values, and comes to judgments
regarding what it perceives.
Nearly all Dickinsons speakers behave according to the primacy of the self, despite the efforts of
others to intrude on them. Indeed, the self is never more apparent in Dickinsons poetry than
when the speaker brandishes it against some potentially violating force. In They shut me up in
Prose (613), the speaker taunts her captives, who have imprisoned her body but not her mind,

which remains free and roaming. Because God most often plays the role of culprit as an
omnipotent being, he can and does impose compromising conditions upon individuals according
to his whim in Dickinsons work. Against this power, the self is essentially defined. The
individual is subject to any amount of suffering, but so long as he or she remains a sovereign
self, he or she still has that which separates him or her from other animate and inanimate beings.
The Power of Words and Poetry

Though Dickinson sequestered herself in Amherst for most of her life, she was quite attuned to
the modern trends of thought that circulated throughout Europe and North America. Perhaps the
most important of these was Charles Darwins theory of evolution, published in 1859. Besides
the tidal wave it unleashed in the scientific community, evolution throttled the notion of a world
created by Gods grand design. For Dickinson, who renounced obedience to God through the
steps of her own mental evolution, this development only reinforced the opposition to the belief
in a transcendent and divine design in an increasingly secularized world.
Dickinson began to see language and the word, which were formerly part of Gods domain, as
the province of the poet. The duty of the poet was to re-create, through words, a sense of the
world as a place in which objects have an essential and almost mythic relationship to each other.
Dickinsons poems often link abstract entities to physical things in an attempt to embrace or
create an integral design in the world. This act is most apparent in her poems of definition, such
as Hope is the thing with feathers (254) or Hope is a subtle Glutton (1547). In these
poems, Dickinson employs metaphors that assign physical qualities to the abstract feeling of
hope in order to flesh out the nature of the word and what it means to human consciousness.
Nature as a Haunted House

In a letter to a friend, Dickinson once wrote: Nature is a Haunted Housebut Arta House that
tries to be haunted. The first part of the sentence implies that the natural world is replete with
mystery and false signs, which deceive humankind as to the purpose of things in nature as well
as to Gods purpose in the creation of nature. The sentences second part reveals the poets role.
The poet does not exist merely to render aspects of nature, but rather to ascertain the character of
Gods power in the world.
For Dickinson, however, the characterizing of Gods power proved to be complicated since she
often abstained from using the established religious symbols for things in nature. This abstention
is most evident in Dickinsons poem about a snake, A narrow Fellow in the Grass (986), in
which Dickinson refrains from the easy reference to Satan in Eden. Indeed, in many of her nature
poems, such as A Bird came down the Walk (328), Dickinson ultimately insists on depicting
nature as unapologetically incomprehensible, and thus haunted.
Motifs
The Speakers Unique Poetic Voice

Dickinsons speakers are numerous and varied, but each exhibits a similar voice, or distinctive
tone and style. Poets create speakers to literally speak their poems; while these speakers might
share traits with their creators or might be based on real historical figures, ultimately they are
fictional entities distinct from their writers. Frequently, Dickinson employs the first person,
which lends her poems the immediacy of a dialogue between two people, the speaker and the
reader. She sometimes aligns multiple speakers in one poem with the use of the plural personal
pronoun we. The first-person singular and plural allow Dickinson to write about specific
experiences in the world: her speakers convey distinct, subjective emotions and individual
thoughts rather than objective, concrete truths. Readers are thus invited to compare their
experiences, emotions, and thoughts with those expressed in Dickinsons lyrics. By emphasizing
the subjectivity, or individuality, of experience, Dickinson rails against those educational and
religious institutions that attempt to limit individual knowledge and experience.
The Connection Between Sight and Self

For Dickinson, seeing is a form of individual power. Sight requires that the seer have the
authority to associate with the world around her or him in meaningful ways and the sovereignty
to act based on what she or he believes exists as opposed to what another entity dictates. In this
sense, sight becomes an important expression of the self, and consequently the speakers in
Dickinsons poems value it highly. The horror that the speaker of I heard a Fly buzzwhen I
died (465) experiences is attributable to her loss of eyesight in the moments leading up to her
death. The final utterance, I could not see to see (16), points to the fact that the last gasp of life,
and thus of selfhood, is concentrated on the desire to see more than anything else. In this
poem, sight and self are so synonymous that the end of one (blindness) translates into the end of
the other (death).
In other poems, sight and self seem literally fused, a connection that Dickinson toys with by
playing on the sonic similarity of the words I and eye. This wordplay abounds in Dickinsons
body of work. It is used especially effectively in the third stanza of The Soul selects her own
Society (303), in which the speaker declares that she knows the soul, or the self. She
commands the soul to choose one person from a great number of people and then close the lids
of attention. In this poem, the I that is the soul has eyelike properties: closing the lids, an act
that would prevent seeing, is tantamount to cutting off the I from the rest of society.
Symbols
Feet

Feet enter Dickinsons poems self-referentially, since the words foot and feet denote poetic terms
as well as body parts. In poetry, feet are the groups of syllables in a line that form a metrical
unit. Dickinsons mention of feet in her poems generally serves the dual task of describing
functioning body parts and commenting on poetry itself. Thus, when the speaker of A narrow
Fellow in the Grass (986) remembers himself a Barefoot boy (11), he indirectly alludes to a
time when his sense of poetry was not fully formed. Likewise, when the speaker of After great
pain, a formal feeling comes (341) notes that feet are going around in his head while he is going
mad, he points to the fact that his ability to make poetry is compromised.
Stone

In Dickinsons poems, stones represent immutability and finality: unlike flowers or the light of
day, stones remain essentially unchanged. The speaker in Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
(216) imagines the dead lying unaffected by the breezes of natureand of life. After the speaker
chooses her soul in The Soul selects her own Society (303), she shuts her eyes Like Stone
(12), firmly closing herself off from sensory perception or society. A stone becomes an
object of envy in How happy is the little Stone (1510), a poem in which the speaker longs for
the rootless independence of a stone bumping along, free from human cares.
Birds

Dickinson uses the symbol of birds rather flexibly. In A Bird came down the Walk (328), the
bird becomes an emblem of the unyielding mystery of nature, while in Hope is the thing with
feathers (254), the bird becomes a personification of hope. Elsewhere, Dickinson links birds to

poets, whose job is to sing whether or not people hear. In Splitthe Larkand youll find the
Music (861), Dickinson compares the sounds of birds to the lyrical sounds of poetry; the poem
concludes by asking rhetorically whether its listeners now understand the truths produced by
both birds and poetry. Like nature, symbolized by the bird, art produces soothing, truthful
sounds.