Emily Dickinson Research Paper

The Life and Poems of Emily Dickinson The life of the great American poet Emily Dickinson is often characterized by death, loneliness, and isolation. While a majority of her poems do reflect these somber themes, there are many that also contemplate the diverse intricacies of love and the ensuing pain and heartbreak that often follows or accompanies it. Even though Dickinson never married and instead alienated herself from society in order to focus on creating beautiful poetry, she did have close, emotional relationships with several friends and family members. These relationships, some romantic in nature, some not, were the focus of poems such as “You left me - Sire - two Legacies -”, “Wild nights - Wild nights!”, “Heart, we will forget him!”,

She was the middle child of Emily and Edward Dickinson, a politician. She grew up close with her older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia, first in a family home known as the Homestead, then in a house on North Pleasant Street in Amherst, where she enjoyed baking, gardening, reading books, taking part in church activities, writing letters, taking walks, learning to sing, and playing the piano.
As a young girl, Dickinson was given access to a remarkable education, especially for females of the time. She attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847, where she was able to learn from many teachers who were recent graduates of Amherst College, and were therefore generally young and intellectually curious. Dickinson herself was an eager student, but was also a social person at this stage of her life, and spent much time with her girlfriends. In 1847, she entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), where she stayed for one

The speaker is attempting to get over a lover, and tells her heart to “forget the warmth he gave”, while she herself “will forget the light.” The heart is personified because, as an organ without a brain, it cannot actually forget things, but a human being can. The speaker is urging her heart to forget him fast, while she still has the will and the strength to do so. The former lover served as a warmth and a light for the speaker in the dark world in which Emily Dickinson lived, and once the speaker forgets him as she hopes to do, her thoughts will dim, as his light no longer touches her mind. At the end of the poem, the speaker compels her heart to make haste and forget him faster, or else she has to live longer with the pain of remembering and thinking about him. The use of exclamation points in this poem is also telling of the determination the speaker has to forget the lover, and the difficulty she has in doing