Emily Dickinson

Although all three of the poems we read by Emily Dickinson struck me as odd, "I died for Beauty-but was scarce" had the most effect. on me. The way Dickinson writes as a dead person makes me wonder how she thought of herself. The common theme throughout her poems was death, and this one especially seems to point towards the possibility that she felt as one dead. As Aaron told us in class, she divorced her husband whom she had supposedly fallen in love with, and after that she lived in isolation from society. I wonder if Dickinson feels as though the loss of her love was also the loss of her real life, and that she is now merely living as a specter. Maybe this is why she wore white all the time, because she felt like her life she lost and she left as nothing but a ghost in this world. The idea of her "dying for Beauty" especially makes me think that Dickinson believed she "died" after her divorce because marriage and love are usually thought of as beautiful things.