This paper analyzes Emily Dickinson's poem Because I can't stay for death. By establishing the dialectical relationship between reality and imagination, known and unknown, the concept of infinity is clarified by using the past image in memory; Eternal views; Understanding of the incomprehensible; The stage of existence.
Dickinson's, because I can't stop dying
In "Because I Can't Stop for Death" (J7 12), Emily Dickinson illustrates the concept of infinity by establishing the dialectical relationship between reality and imagination, and between the known and the unknown. [1] By looking at this relationship as a whole and at different levels, including all stages of life, including death and eternity, Dickinson put forward the essence of the interaction and mutual determination between finite and infinite. [2]
From an eternal point of view, the speaker recalled the experience that happened on the earth centuries ago. In her memory, she tried to determine the eternal world through the relationship with secular standards, because she said that the "century" in eternity (2 1) was "shorter than the day" (22). Similarly, by personifying death as a kind and civilized gentleman, the speaker lists the characteristics of the beneficial connotation of death. [3] Similarly, finite and infinite are merged in the fourth section:
Dew shivering and cold-only tulle, my robe-my shawl-only tulle-(14-16)
In these lines, the speaker's time exists, which allows her to tremble when she is cooled by dew, and merge with the spiritual universe, because the speaker is wearing a robe and a cloak or shawl, which are made of tulle, spider's web and tulle respectively. Tulle is a thin and open net-shaped time covering, suggesting a transparent spiritual quality.
Understanding the incomprehensible often depends on understanding the process of existence stage. By recalling the specific stages of life on earth, the speaker not only solved her time past, but also looked at these events from a higher consciousness, whether literally or symbolically. For example, literally, when the carriage rises to the height of heaven, the house looks like a "ground heave" (18). This poem symbolizes three stages of life: "school, where children struggle" (9) may represent childhood; "Staring at the field of grain" (1 1), mature; And "sunset" (12) old age. Regard the progress of these stages-life, death and eternity-as a continuum, and give meaning to these isolated and usually incomprehensible events. [4] From her eternal point of view, the speaker understands that life is like a "horse's head" (23), leading "to eternity" (24). [5]
Through her infinite fusion and gradual sequencing of the secular world and the spiritual world, Dickinson dialectically shapes the meaning from the limitations of life, allowing readers to catch a glimpse of a universe in an instant, in which seemingly different and discontinuous stages of existence are implicated and set as a whole.
notes
[1. Other people who have written Emily Dickinson's reaction to death include Ruth Miller (Emily Dickinson's Poems [Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,1968]); Poems by Robert Weisbuch Emily Dickinson [Chicago, 1 1 1]. : university of Chicago p,1975]); Carol anne tyler (The Irony between Kierkegaard and Emily Dickinson, The Anglo-German Journal of Linguistics 77 [1978]: 569-81); Charles Anderson (Emily Dickinson's poem: The Ladder of Surprise [new york Holt, Reinhardt,1960]); Sharon Cameron (Lyric Time (Baltimore: John Hopkins U P,1979)); Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (The Poet's Voice: Aspects of Emily Dickinson's Poetic Style [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968]).
[2] The theoretical basis of this argument is based in part on the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant and others, who described the boundary concept of human experience as an intermediary: "The sensory world is just a series of representations connected according to universal laws; Therefore, it has no survival of its own; It is not the thing itself, so it must point to the thing that contains the basis of this experience, to the existence that cannot be recognized only as a phenomenon, but as the thing itself. And ed. Paul carus [Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1902] 124].
[3] In The Long Shadow, Clark Griffith based this poem on the secular tradition. He pointed out that death stopped for the poetess and reflected "the tradition of court love in the 19th century" (129), which allowed readers to evaluate "death" as "kindness or malice" (/kloc-0)
[4] In The Rhetoric of American Romance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University P 1984), Evan Carlton said, "Being close to God is generally a more satisfactory one for Dickinson. . . The relationship between itself and the universe. . ."(270).
[5. Jane D. Eberwin, in Dickinson: Strategies of Restriction (amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). It is believed that death did not "bring the personality of this poem into another world", but left the personality in a "house" (2 18).