limova Professor Viorica Patea Birk American Poetry and Poetics 30 November 2014 “Dying is a wild night and a new road”: different approaches to the concept of death in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In 1852, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to Jane Humphrey, one of her longtime friends, in which she states: “I think of the grave very often, and how much it has got of mine, and whether I can ever stop it from carrying of what I love; that makes me sometimes speak of it when I don’t intend.” (Dickinson, 197) In another letter addressed to her cousin, Dickinson wrote a phrase that later became one of the most widely quoted statements of the poetess: “Dying is a wild night and a new road”. (463) In the extensive correspondence Dickinson carried on throughout her lifetime, we …show more content…
We can find this type of the detached observer in a range of Dickinson’s poems many of her poems; an onlooker who carefully watches a dying person with an intention to perceive the mystery of death and its impact on the dying person. Dickinson’s vivid interest in comprehending of nature of the process of dying was often criticized by her contemporaries for being morbid. “I‘ve seen a Dying Eye” is another intention to solve the magnetic mystery of death: the dying person eyes searches for something in the premortal agony, while the observer tries to perceive the essence of dying: “I‘ve seen a Dying Eye / Round and round a Room – / In search of Something – as it seemed – ” The intentions of the onlooker remains idle, there is no possibility to unveil the mystery of death or to know what happens to a dying person at the moment of crossing the border. The only way one to comprehend the significance of the process of dying and to know if there is a new beginning after physical death is a personal encounter with