I initially didn't like Dickinson, my mind is starting to change.

At first, when I saw we were going to read Dickinson, I remembered how sad her life was and how much I disliked her writing style. While I don't remember what I read by her in high school, I will say now that after reading these four poems, I actually enjoy her. I find it compelling to read her poems which are quite creative in describing events. And I think the reason why I felt as if she led a sad and lonely life was because she was writing so much about the Civil War and death. So, getting that out of the way, my favorite of the three poems we read for Thursday has to be “They dropped like flakes”.

Of all the ways to describe death, the image of soldiers dropping quickly like snowfall or as miserably as petals from a rose is inspiring to say the least. What makes this poem more forceful is its brevity. Within two stanzas I knew exactly what she felt and exactly what she was imagining; an empty field full of grass and dead bodies, brothers and cousins on opposites sides of a gruesome war. One of my favorite lines probably was “But God on his repealless list/Can summon every face.” This statement further implies that all of those soldiers, who were dying so quickly, in the bloodiest war up until that time, could not have been identified due to the multitude and magnitude of death in a single area. Rarely any other war had such destruction and death as the Civil War of which Dickinson was writing about.

Most likely, people she knew were involved in the war and the death and disappearance of people around her also inspired her to write this and other such war poems. Most of Dickinson’s poems are very short and I was surprised and unimpressed by “It feels a shame to be alive”. This is the type of poem I was hoping not to read. How sad and depressed one must feel to say she is “ashamed” to be alive. The other issue I had with it was the fact that it was so long; quite unlike the majority of her work. She is such a good, brief, direct poet; I found it odd that this poem had five stanzas. I was not only confused by the length, but also by the dashes and capitalization. The only present feelings of Dickinson I could infer was the fact that the soldiers were saviors, which again goes back to how I said before that immortality doesn’t seem to be a common theme of hers.

In most of her poems, the topic revolves around mortality; we all die, and the soldiers do so in such a horrific way. If anyone was to make the case for immortality as a theme, it would be the idea that soldiers in general were our saviors and thus immortal in a larger sense, but as she stated in “They dropped like flies”, only God remembers their faces.