Keywords: death, eternity, finite, infinite

Introduction  

   Emily Dickinson（1830-1886）, the American best-known female poet ，was

one of the foremost authors in American literature. Emily Dickinson ’s

poems, as well as Walt Whitman’s, were considered as a part of "American

renaissance"; they were regarded as pioneers of imagism. Both of them rejected

custom and received wisdom and experimented with poetic style. She however

differs from Whitman in a variety of ways. For one thing, Whitman seems

to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life

of the individual. Whereas Whitman is "national" in his outlook, Dickinson

is "regional"

   Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830.

She lived almost her entire life in the same town (much of it in the same

house), traveled infrequently, never married, and in her last years never

left the grounds of her family. So she was called "vestal of Amherst".

And yet despite this narrow -- some might say -- pathologically constricted-outward

experience, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply

passionate person who throughout her adult life wrote poems (add up to

around 2000 ) that were startlingly original in both content and technique,

poems that would profoundly influence several generations of American poets

and that would win her a secure position as one of the greatest poets that

America has ever produced.

  Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual

writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and

ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors

of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings

on the significance of literature, music, and art.

   Emily Dickinson enjoys the King James Version of the Bible, as well

as authors such as English WRTERS William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles

Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle.

Dickinson’s early style shows the strong influence of William Shakespeare,

Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John

Keats and George Herbert. And Dickinson read Emerson appreciatively, who

became a pervasive and, in a sense, formative influence over her. As George

F. Whicher notes, "Her sole function was to test the Transcendentalist

ethic in its application to the inner life".

1“death” in Emily Dickinson’s poets

   For as long as history has been recorded and probably for much longer,

man has always been different idea of his own death. Even those of us who

have accepted death graciously, have at least in some way, --- feared,

dreaded, or attempted to delay its arrival. We have personified death--

as an evildoer dressed in all black, its presence swoops down upon us and

chokes the life from us as though it were some street murder with malicious

intent. But in reality, we know that death is not the chaotic grim reaper

of fairy tales and mythology. Rather than being a cruel and unfair prankster

of evil, death is an unavoidable and natural part of life itself.

   Death and immorality is the major theme in the largest portion of Emily

Dickinson’s poetry. Her preoccupation with these subjects amounted to an

obsession so that about one third of her poems dwell on them. Dickinson’s

many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur often

in the Amherst of the time added to her gloomy meditation. Dickinson’s

is not sheer depiction of death, but an emphatic one of relations between

life and death, death and love, death and eternity. Death is a must-be-crossed

bridge. She did not fear it, because the arrival in another world is only

through the grave and the forgiveness from God is the only way to eternity.