How does Emily Dickinson portray grief in her poems?
In the poems ‘It was not death for I stood up’, ‘After great pain – a formal feeling comes’
and ‘I measure every grief I meet – ‘ Dickinson presents the multifaceted nature of grief.
Grief becomes a tangible experience that can be felt and seen but produces many different
contrasting emotional reactions of intrigue, suffering, despair and hope.
In ‘It was not death for I stood up’ Dickinson uses physical imagery such as ‘Death’, ‘Night’,
‘Frost’ and ‘Fire’ to express her experience of grief. Dickinson’s diction emphasises the
suffering and hopelessness experienced by the speaker for example, through her
juxtaposition of the extreme element’s ‘frost’ and ‘fire’ but also the despair invoked by
words such as ‘Death’ and ‘Night’. The capitalisation of these nouns almost implies that they
are of value to the overall meaning of the poem, which is ironic because the speaker shows
us through the constant repetition of ‘not’ that they all manage to fall short of defining her
true meaning and experience. The anaphoric repetition of ‘it’ in the first two stanzas and
omission of the word grief suggests that it is so painful and confusing that this experience
cannot be summed up in a word. Grief is so unpredictable and chaotic that it can only be
understood through the figurative and abstract work of poetry. This was identified by Dr
Linda Freedman who argued that ‘the idea of the ineffable, the unsayable, was a defining
feature of Dickinson’s creative imagination’. This poem seems to be a satirical remark to
those poets and prose writers who try and explain such vast and painful experiences in
simplistic terms.
However, in ‘I measure every grief I meet’ Dickinson looks at grief from a slightly different
angle. She attempts to analyse and observe it as if it is a medical condition. Those who suffer
from grief are called ‘patients’ and it can be ‘weighed’, ‘measured’ and causes ‘aching’. The
medical/scientific lexis used presents grief as a type of disease or condition that the speaker
analyses to learn more about it. She looks at grief ‘with narrow, probing, Eyes’ conative of
her inquisitiveness. The capitalisation of ‘Eyes’ is significant and suggests some deeper
meaning, possibly relating to the idea that the eyes are the gateway of the soul, and they
allow us to see, scrutinise and understand things especially emotional and spiritual things.
Dickinson’s use of sophisticated and scientific lexis is euphemistic in a sense as it attempts to
conceal the morbid bleakness of a subject such as grief through its detached and impersonal
tone. The speaker wonders if those who experience grief have like her considered suicide as
she asks ‘whether – could They choose between – It would not be – to die –‘. The syntactical
fragmentation created by the dashes gives frequent pauses and dramatizes this ultimate
choice that must be made ‘to die’ or carry on. All who face grief come to this ultimatum just
as the persona has, yet the fact that they are speaking to us shows that they chose to live
and so gives hope that it is possible to survive grief.
In ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ Dickinson uses funeral imagery to bring to life
the internal experience of mourning and similarly to ‘It was not death – for I stood up’ she
draws on natural images to liken grieving unto. She describes the grieving process as a
‘formal feeling’ that comes after loss which we can infer is the ‘great pain’. The alliteration
of ‘formal feeling’ creates soft fricative sounds which embody a dull and still. The adjective
‘formal’ alludes to a solemn occasion such as a funeral. This is further emphasised by her
nerves which ‘sit ceremonious, like Tombs’ similar to guests at a funeral sitting still and dead
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