on us.” Elements are seen through a background of fear, dread, anxiety, and an effective amount of wonder causing her to create poems reflecting her emotions. “Dickinson lived in doubt without ever despairing. She did not know the final answers to the important religious questions; and, what is more, she knew she could never know them.”9 While her quest for faith was intruding, the poem above deals with this in her life. This sense of worry about salvation after death takes many forms in every period of her life. “This doubt solidifies into an almost prosaic statement of despair.” 10 In all of her descriptions of death that her poems reveal, it is for many to wonder if she welcomed it in her life to be a solution to her problems. This excerpt in one of her poems, tells how death and sanity plays a role in her speculated mind:I felt a Funeral in my Brain,And when they were all seated,And Mourners to and fro A Service, like a Drum—Kept—treading—till it seemed Kept beating—beating—till I That Sense was breaking through thought My Mind was going numb—“Characteristically, she is both doubter and questioner, probing the mysteries of death, immorality, and eternity, appropriating biblical sources of Calvinist theology, but preferring to question on her own terms.”11 In almost six hundred poems she explored the nature of death as completely as any American ever dared. Her focus on death has been attributed to a number of rational explanations. New England Calvinism and the nineteenth-century sentimental-romantic tradition were both obsessed with death in their own way, and were apart of her background and environment. A majority of Dickinson’s poems describe and reveal insanity. Emotions such as pain, fear, tension, and depression resulted in a decisive and some what mental disori...
