Identity and Ideology Beyond Death in Emily Dickinsons...

Emily Dickinson had a fascination with death and mortality throughout her life as a writer. She wrote many poems that discussed what it means not only to die, but to be dead. According to personal letters, Dickinson seems to have remained agnostic about the existence of life after death. In a letter written to Mrs. J. G. Holland, Emily implied that the presence of death alone is what makes people feel the need for heaven: â€Å"If roses had not faded, and frosts had never come, and one had not fallen here and there whom I could not waken, there were no need of other Heaven than the one below.† (Bianchi 83). Even though she was not particularly religious, she was still drawn to the mystery of the afterlife. Her poetry is often contemplative of†¦show more content†¦Beauty is even capitalized in the sentence to stress its importance. By punctuation, one cannot as easily rush through this line without feeling the weight of it. Therefore, I believe it is because Dickinson had found the words to fully express what she meant that she used dashes to intensify their impression on the reader. The narrator of this poem seems to be Dickinson herself. Dickinsons poetry about death is often imaginative of what it would be like to die, (as in â€Å"I heard a fly buzz†). It seems unnecessary for her to create a fictional narrator for her poems that are not about the narrator so much as they are about the situations of the narrator. Also, there is no evidence to indicate the â€Å"I† referring to a person other than Dickinson herself. In â€Å"I died for Beauty,† Dickinson begins by imagining her own death. The opening line does not tell us how the author has died, but attempts to explain why. That she died for beauty could mean one of a number of things. The â€Å"for† could mean â€Å"in order to obtain,† as in the sentence â€Å"I paid for lunch.† The problem with this definition is that the rest of the poem does not indicate the expectation of the narrator to have gained something by dying. Another possible meaning of â€Å"forâ₠¬  could be â€Å"in place of,† as a bodyguard is willing to â€Å"take a bullet for† a person being protected. However,