Views on death: Dickinson vs. The Puritans

    

     I decided to compare Dickinson to the Puritans because their ideas on death and the afterlife provide an interesting contrast.  Dickinson’s ideas on an afterlife vary throughout her poetry, and her approach to death is very casual.  She accepts it as a fact of life and often presents it in a very lighthearted or even ironic way.  The Puritans, on the other hand, treated death more seriously and viewed it as the final barrier keeping them from God.  For them, death was nothing to be feared, because after death they would be with God in complete happiness.  Anne Bradstreet expressed that view in her poetry, asking that: “The world no longer let me love, / My hope and treasure lies above” (107).      

     In contrast, Dickinson’s poetry varied as to what sort of afterlife there would be, and it treated death very casually.  Much of her poetry suggests a belief in an afterlife, but the sort of afterlife that would be changed from poem to poem.  In one of her poems she states that “I never spoke with God / Nor visited in Heaven- / Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the Checks were given” (1969).  Her view in this poem, and in others like it, suggests a belief in a Christian idea of heaven.  However, other poems of hers detail a much more vague interpretation of the afterlife, like how she talks about death as a real person in poem #712, and spends “Centuries” with him.  She also talks about death rather ironically in that poem, saying that:

 “Because I could not stop for Death-
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just Ourselves-
And Immortality.

We slowly drove-He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility-” (1966).

 

     Dickinson obviously believed in some sort of afterlife, but she didn’t seem altogether sure of what it would be like, and her light way of talking about death seems to reflect that.  Even though the Puritans would probably not agree, I think her poetry is very cool, and I appreciate her lighthearted approach.

 

Works Cited

Perkins, George, and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 12th ed.
     Vol. 1. Boston. McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.