By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘My life closed twice before its close’ is one of Emily Dickinson’s finest short poems. In just two quatrains, Dickinson ponders immortality and the concept of an afterlife by posing a first line which doubles up as a riddle. How can one’s life close twice before it … closes? What does she mean? The poem is worth analysing more closely because of this puzzling enigma.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ is poem 258 in Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted’. So begins one of Emily Dickinson’s most striking poems. This poem requires close analysis because it presents an interesting nineteenth-century example of the internalisation of ‘spirits’ and the notion of ‘haunting’.
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain has Corridors—surpassing
Material Place—
Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting—
That Cooler Host.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Light Exists in Spring’ is not Emily Dickinson’s best-known poem, but it is a fine poem about the spring season, so we wanted to offer a few words of analysis of it here. The poem doesn’t appear to be online anywhere already in the ‘correct’ form – i.e. how it’s rendered in the Complete Poems, with the right words capitalised and those trademark dashes in the right place. Here is ‘A Light Exists in Spring’ as it appears in the Complete Poems
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote many poems about death. She also wrote often, and insightfully, about depression, and ‘It was not Death, for I stood up’ is a powerful evocation of what it feels like to be gripped and paralysed by this debilitating emotion. Below is the poem, along with some notes towards an analysis of it. If it was not Death, what was it? A kind of death, at any rate.