My reading of Emily Dickinson

For women's history month I decided to try and tackle reading Emily Dickinsons poetry. 

A few things to note: 

I had gone into her work blind, outside of reading her in High School and promptly forgetting everything I knew nothing about why Dickinsons work is so revered.  

Reading poetry is not my strong suit. Which is part of the reason I wanted to take on this challenge to push myself into the poetry waters so to speak.  

I did not finish the entire collection. I realized after making this decision, that she has over One Thousand and Seven Hundred books. Just reading through for half an hour I could only make it through less than a hundred, not to mention plans of going back to ones that particularly stood out to me (which were many) and study them, doing this all within a month began to stress me out more than motivate me. So, at around 550 or so poems, I have decided to sit with the works I have read and go over my experience with them. 

With everything above mentioned, I really did enjoy this poetry. Normally I have an incredibly hard time finding the meter of poetry. However, it was seemingly easy to find with her works which made reading and taking in her poems so much easier. I couldn’t name the types of meters she uses, but simply tapping them out when I began reading tended to be enough for me to follow along. Her meter was so intoxicating that when I would step away to get to the other tasks that commanded my attention each day, I would find myself thinking within the patterns.  

I also truly loved the content of her poem. It almost reminds me of Persephone, Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Hades, with her love for spring and finding her faith within it, while also her deep understanding for grief, death, and all subjects within that more mournful genre. Her understanding for both seemed to deepen the content of each other topic.  

An interesting theme I believe I caught onto, was that at times Dickinson seemed to question her faith in God, or at the very least wrote poetry resembling the questioning. 

I loved her personification of the elements if nature and spring, as if the brooks, wind, bee, and robin were all cherished friends of hers the way a living person may be. 

I deeply appreciated the grace she handled the morbidity of death, at times a bit nonsensical and at others downright horrifying. 

I do intend on reading more of her poetry, and perhaps giving a bit better of an essay on it. She seems like a poet I can really understand.