She knows that this is close to impossible-like “To fill a Gap” teaches, answering one question just leads to further questions-yet she also posits that a kind of truth can be found, if done so circuitously, as in “Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant –.” Truth and its tenuous natureĭickinson is fascinated and obsessed with the idea of truth, and with finding it in her poems. Death is the ultimate unknowable, and so Dickinson circles around it, painting portraits of each of its many facets, as a way to come as close to knowing it as she can. All of these varied pictures of death, however, do not truly contradict each other. In “Some – Work for Immortality –,” death is the moment where the speaker can cash their check of good behavior for their eternal rewards.
In “My life had stood – a Loaded Gun –,” the existence of death allows for the existence of life. In “Behind Me dips – Eternity,” death is the normal state, life is but an interruption. In “Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she personifies death, and presents the process of dying as simply the realization that there is eternal life. In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” Dickinson investigates the physical process of dying. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing, sometimes simply inevitable. No two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry.
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