The recurring theme of death throughout the poems that Emily Dickinson wrote is astonishing to think about. Given the time period that she lived in (with high mortality rates) and the fact that she had so many people that she loved and cared for to die, I am able to see why it was an important part of her life. Even when she writes her poetry about the civil war, she fixates herself on the violent and deadly aspects of the war (how can you blame her).
The imagery that she uses in her poems makes you picture things in a totally different way. In “Safe in their alabaster chambers” she writes in the third stanza, “Grand go the years in the crescent above them.” I can just picture time passing by slowly as day turns to night and night to day. It is horrible to think about. In “The Battlefield” poem she says “They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, like petals from a rose.” You can just see men dying left and right just as quickly as a flower loses its petals. You think about this and realized that this happened in this country and she had first hand accounts living during this time. It is heartbreaking to think about, but intriguing to see it from her eyes.
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I agree with you whole-heartedly about the tragedy it is that her life was so filled with death. To follow up on your ideas about her vivid imagery, I'd like to point out that she seems to go out of her way to use very everyday/common objects in her metaphors. Everyone can easily picture petals falling from a rose so it also increases the readers ability to picture wounded soldiers falling in the same manner. Another reason she uses common things in her metaphors could be to show just how common death was during that time, as you mentioned. The specific details of Dickinson’s metaphors definitely make her poems stand out.
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