sures from her father to do well in school plagued her so much that she found her only refuge in seclusion (Capps 15). Dressed in the purifying color of white, Dickinson turned to life in the seclusion of her bedroom writing down her fears and pains of death and the hope of life after death (Conarro 71). Withdrawing from traditional ways of seeing, she separated her consciousness from almost all others and tried to understand the phenomenon that is consciousness itself (Bu*censored* 1). There were many things which Emily Dickinson tried to understand, but she was particularly interested in the mystery of death. It is evident in her poetry that, the idea of death was for her the overwhelming, omnipresent emotional experience of her life, and powerfully influenced her poetry, especially in its intensity and richness (Ferlazzo 64). It overtook her thoughts and became a obsession which she had to satisfy; yet Dickinson would not confide in the church to help provide the food she hungered for. Ford explains that she believed that having felt no inner conversion, she could not honestly acknowledge allegiance to a church(18). He goes on to say that, this refusal was very likely a source of self-doubt and torment, but a burden perhaps made easier to bear through her poetry(18). Eventhough Emily Dickinson did not attend church, the heart of her preoccupation was her religiousmotivation(18). Her questions of immortality puzzled her and the worries of death absorbed her thoughts, for she did not know whether to believe in the after-life or not. David Rutledge of The Explicator writes that, in the presence of death, the whole idea of faith has come to seem nothing more than a cruel hoax. The final sense is that death is the punch line to a bad joke that has gone too far(83). It seems as if Dickinsons fear may be that death may not be so benevolent after all. The only way she could ever know the true answer would be if she were to die. ...
