;life from us as though it were some street murder with malicious
intent. But in reality, we know that death is not the chaotic grim reaper
of fairy tales and mythology. Rather than being a cruel and unfair prankster
of evil, death is an unavoidable and natural part of life itself.
Death and immorality is the major theme in the largest portion of Emily
Dickinson’s poetry. Her preoccupation with these subjects amounted to an
obsession so that about one third of her poems dwell on them. Dickinson’s
many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur often
in the Amherst of the time added to her gloomy meditation. Dickinson’s
is not sheer depiction of death, but an emphatic one of relations between
life and death, death and love, death and eternity. Death is a must-be-crossed
bridge. She did not fear it, because the arrival in another world is only
through the grave and the forgiveness from God is the only way to eternity.