What are Emily Dickinson's beliefs about death?

Question

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

A crucial issue at the time was the issue of religion, to Emily religion was the “all important question” The descendents of the Dickinson’s can be traced back to the early Puritan settlers who left Lincolnshire in the late 17th Century to travel to America to practise religious freedom. In the nineteenth century religion was still the dominant issue of the day. The East coast in particular saw a revival of strict Calvinism, developing partly in response, to the more inclusive Unitarianism. Amherst College itself was founded with the intention of training ministers to spread the word. Calvinism. By inclinination, Emily Dickinson would probably have been more at ease with the looser and more inclusive ideology of Unitarianism But the “great Revival” as it was known pushed the Calvinist view to greatest prominence.

The Calvinist approach to religion believed that men were inherently sinful and most humans were doomed to hell. There was only a small number who would be saved, and this could only be achieved by the adherent proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ as the true saviour. There was subtle but concerted effort to encourage people to declare themselves saved. Both at school and at college there would have been much of this subtle pressure put on Emily to join the “saved” but this she never did. Her father was not too concerned with the religious views of his children even though later in his life he also accepted this belief. Thus on the crucial issue of the day Emily was relatively isolated. Amongst other reasons Emily could never accept the doctrine of “original sin”. Despite remaining true to her own convictions Emily was left with a sense of exclusion from the established religion and these sentiments inform much of her poetry. There is frequent reference to “being shut out of heaven”. Yet despite this rejection of the orthodox religion, there is much in her poetry which reveals a profoundly religious temperament. For Emily religious experience was not a simple intellectual statement of belief but more accurately reflected in the beauty of nature, the experiences of ecstatic joy. Yet although the poet expresses intense inner experiences this separation from established religion is a factor in her uncertainties and fluctuations in sentiment, evident in many poems.

Answer 2

Emily Dickinson Beliefs

Answer 3

She was a seriously depressed woman who wrote about death quite a bit and took her own life. I assume that her beliefs on death were that she was a fatalist - what is called "passive suicidal" - she didnt care if she woke up in the morning or not. Pax - C.

Answer 4

That it was - she hoped - the door to Eternity:

" Emily Dickinson all through her life, a never-fulfilled desire for firm confidence in the
presence of a loving, attentive God. It would be wrong, I think, to suggest that she had great
doubts about God’s existence; rather, she wondered, famously, whether this God were near
enough or personal enough to be at all useful. The cold, distant, disinterested God of the Deists
was not sufficient for her. With many of the Romantics, she sought comfort, warmth, presence
and, significantly, reassurance in the face of death, that mystery which most consumed her from
her youth on. Her frustrated desire for this more personal God – particularly in the face of
death – is clear in this poem (#1581) in which she does not argue about God’s existence but
laments God’s absence or impotence by picturing God with an amputated hand.
Those—dying then,
Knew where they went—
They went to God’s Right Hand—
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found—
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small—
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all— [#1581]
“Those—dying then,” in other words, believers who went before her, had certain faith. They
“knew where they went—” But no longer. Now “God cannot be found—” But if the only point
of the poem were to bemoan an absent God, a God with an amputated hand, the piece would be
flat, ordinary. Dickinson goes beyond that. She remembers that life cannot be significant,
grand, ennobled without belief in something beyond us. “The abdication of Belief” she writes,
“Makes the behavior small—” and most of us know this intuitively; without the context of
transcendence, without a sense that the material world is grounded in or saturated with
something more than itself, behavior becomes “small,” trivialized. The recently deceased Pope,
whether you agreed with him or not, was not small but enormous in stature, precisely because he
was grounded in transcendence, in God. Otherwise he would have been simply another man
with political power and provocative ideas. If everything is all just atoms, who can ultimately
Page 6
6
make a case for the moral life? So, the power in the poem is not just in its confession that God
seems absent, or disabled, but in its awareness of how tragic that is, of how much is lost in a
world where God’s hand is amputated. “The abdication of Belief/Makes the behavior small—”
And then, to drive the point still deeper, she says that even an elusive faith – an ignis fatuus,
something like a will-o-the-wisp – is better, “than no illume at all.” So, here is a poem that does
not blink in the face of God’s seeming absence at times in our lives … yet still claims for us the
importance of our struggle for faith, the significance of our search for God. Listen to it again:
Those—dying then,
Knew where they went—
They went to God’s Right Hand—
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found—
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small—
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all—
This struggle – this epic tension – between a sense of God’s presence and God’s absence,
between an intuitive apprehension of the reality of God and a rationalist concern that God was
somehow uninvolved – was, in Emily Dickinson, a catalyst for great creativity. This was not the
gentle prodding of a benign muse but a crucible-like experience, a life-long, active, sometimes
painful questioning which gave rise to some of the most powerful poetry in the English language.
One might compare it to Jesus’ struggle in Gethsemane, or his cry of dereliction from the cross,or, as in the reading from Exodus this morning, the urgent desire of Moses to see God, even ifthe only result is to see God’s back.