艾米莉狄金森诗歌中的死亡和永恒主题

Death and eternity themes in Emily Dickinson’s poems

Abstract: Death and eternity are the major themes in most of Emily Dickinson’s poems. “Because I could not stop for death” is one of her classic poems. Through the analysis, this essay clarifies infinite conceptions by the dialectical relationship between reality and imagination, the known and the unknown. And it tells what’s eternity in Dickson’s eyes.

Keywords: death, eternity, finite, infinite

Introduction

Emily Dickinson（1830-1886）, the American best-known female poet ，was one of the foremost authors in American literature. Emily Dickinson’s poems, as well as Walt Whitman’s, were considered as a part of "American renaissance"; they were regarded as pioneers of imagism. Both of them rejected custom and received wisdom and experimented with poetic style. She however differs from Whitman in a variety of ways. For one thing, Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual. Whereas Whitman is "national" in his outlook, Dickinson is "regional"

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830. She lived almost her entire life in the same town (much of it in the same house), traveled infrequently, never married, and in her last years never left the grounds of her family. So she was called "vestal of Amherst". And yet despite this narrow -- some might say -- pathologically constricted-outward experience, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply passionate person who throughout her adult life wrote poems (add up to around 2000) that were startlingly original in both content and technique, poems that would profoundly influence several generations of American poets and that would win her a secure position as one of the greatest poets that America has ever produced. Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings on the significance of literature, music, and art.

Emily Dickinson enjoys the King James Version of the Bible, as well as authors such as English WRTERS William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. Dickinson’s early styl e shows the strong influence of William Shakespeare, Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John Keats and George Herbert. And Dickinson read Emerson appreciatively, who became a pervasive and, in a sense, formative influence over her. As George F. Whicher notes, "Her sole function was to test the Transcendentalist ethic in its application to the inner life".

1、“death” in Emily Dickinson’s poets

For as long as history has been recorded and probably for much longer, man has always been different idea of his own death. Even those of us who have accepted death graciously, have at least in some way, --- feared, dreaded, or attempted to delay its arrival. We have personified death-- as an evildoer dressed in all black, its presence swoops down upon us and chokes the life from us as though it were some street murder with malicious intent. But in reality, we know that death is not the chaotic grim reaper of fairy tales and mythology. Rather than being a cruel and unfair prankster of evil, death is an unavoidable and natural part of life itself.

Death and immorality is the major theme in the largest portion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Her preoccupation with these subjects amounted to an obsession so that about one third of her poems dwell on them. Dickinson’s many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur