Themes in the poems of Emily Dickinson

         In the modern poetic world of America, Emily Dickinson plays a significant role which makes her different from contemporary modern poets. Her poems question the nature of death and immortality. She is remembered for her unique poetry. She writes from life experience and her deepest thoughts, and for herself as a way of letting out her feelings. As a poet, she deals with various themes such as nature, love, pain and suffering, death and immortality, God and religion, artistic philosophy, universality and so on. Thus, the range of themes in her poetry is very wide. Actually, she goes through the depth of humane psyche to the profundity of nature.

        Emily feels the necessity and profundity of nature. It plays an important role in making her poetic theme glorious and age-worthy. To her, nature is extremely harmonious. It is an image of humanity. She considers nature as the gentlest mother, as she finds mother-like love amidst nature. Nature is the source of joy and beauty; the beauty of that nature holds up in the beholder's perspective.

        Emily Dickinson’s treatment of love shows her as a representative figure in the field of love and emotion. Her love poems are psychological as well as autobiographical. Love is a mystic life force; it should be free from voluptuousness. Her poems run the range from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion; they are generally intense.

        Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. No two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing, sometimes simply inevitable. In “Because I could not stop for Death", she personifies death and presents the process of dying as simply the realisation that there is eternal life. Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is ambivalent; death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on humanity by God, a welcome relief, and a blessed way to heaven. Immortality is often related to death.

        Immortality has occupied an important place in her poetic world. Emily Dickinson says death functions as a connecting link between life and immortality. The conventional idea of immortality, with its insistence upon splendour and a majestic transformation, is in her poem uniquely reworked to present her belief in the reality of the soul after death.  

        The theme of pain and suffering is also an organic part of her poetic theme. Actually, Emily Dickinson is a poet of universal grief whose poetic feelings go on with the stream of eternal sufferings. Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or other positive value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of ecstasy and makes joy more vital. The pain of loss or of lacking/not having enhances our appreciation of victory, success, etc.; the pain of separation indicates the degree of our desire for union, whether with another human being or God.

         Man's relationship to God and nature is a concern throughout Dickinson's life. Her attitude toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent, at other times cruel. Emily Dickinson transcends her poetic range to make her immortal and universal. Her universe is the universe of all people. Her poetry shows her personal confession through better experience. We can call her the greatest modern poet. Emily Dickinson is a perfect poet who expresses her deepest thoughts under the guise of various themes.