Emily Dickinson’s Poetry Crucial Themes

Emily Dickinson’s poetry had crucial themes: religion, death, home and family, nature and love. Emily Dickinson was a spiritual lady. Her poetry depicts religious aspect in her poems. She talks about God and Heaven in many of her poems. Some of her poems that indicates religious aspects are: “God permits industrious angels”, “Going to Heaven!”, “I went to Heaven”, and “Bless God, he went as soldiers”. Emily Dickinson wrote about death often. She talks about death often with immortality, which indicates her religious image. Emily Dickinson feared death and this can be presented in her poetry. Dickinson’s poems that include death are “Death is like the insect”, “The distance that the dead have gone”, Wait till the majesty of Death”, “She died, - this was the way she died”, “If I should die”, and “So proud she was to die” (The Poetry of Emily Dickinson).

Dickinson’s family circle presents a massive effect in her writing. She also was confined to her house most of her life, so her poetry shows the loneliness she experienced. Some of her poetry that shows the theme of her home life and loneliness is “I felt a funeral in my brain”, “It was not death, for I stood up”, and “there’s a certain slant of life” (The Poetry of Emily Dickinson). Nature is a large subject of Emily Dickinson’s writing. In Dickinson’s writings nature is taken as a joy but it can also be known as dangerous. Dickinson discovered happiness in nature. It is reflected in some of her poetry. On the other hand, if nature is related with death, nature might be a dreadful thing also (Emily Dickinson: An Overview). A number of her poetry that has the theme of nature is “Nature, the gentlest mom”, “A bird came down the walk”, “A narrow fellow in the grass”, “I’ll tell you how the sun rose”, and “How happy is the little stone”. (The Poetry of Emily Dickinson) Love is a subject in Dickinson’s poetry. Emily Dickinson was never married, but the reader can inform by analyzing a number of her love poems, that she was in love at least one point in her existence. Some of her love poems consist: “That I did always love”, “I gave myself to him”, “Love is anterior to life”, “Poor little heart”, and “I cannot live with you” (The Poetry of Emily Dickinson).