Essay
Analysing 'This World is not Conclusion'
Analysing 'This World is not Conclusion' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘This World is not Conclusion’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents ideas and feelings about faith in ‘This World is not Conclusion’
and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
In this poem Dickinson explores her feelings about the afterlife, combining the teachings of the
Calvinist community around her in 19th century Amherst with her own mix of doubt and
uncertainty. This is shown in her launch off into elaboration, digression and contingency and
ending in much less coherent fashion than she started.
The opening begins with a confident and assertive tone. The first line ‘This World is not Conclusion’
begins with a sense of absolute certainty by using the only full stop in the poem. The stative verb ‘is’
along with the uncontracted negative ‘is not’ produces a bold statement of fact, heightened by the
beat that the strong trimeter places on ‘not’. The next line, present and in simple tense ‘A Species
stands beyond’ is a metaphor that seems just as certain, creating an image of an almost omniscient
or unyielding presence. The simile on the third and fourth line ‘positive, as sound’ has connotations
of having scientific evidence where ‘positive’ implies the existence of an afterlife can be measured.
These opening lines are presented with absolute certainty. Similarly in ‘Going to heaven!’ although
less emphatic, the narrator is assertive and excited as shown in the exclamation mark at the end.
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