This small poem tells us about the agonized looks of a sufferer and finally about the agony of death. The look of agony is real because it cannot be imitated. On the contrary, men may simulate a look of cheerfulness. The agony of the dying man and the gaze in his eyes cannot be unreal, because such convulsion and agony cannot possibly be imitated.
Emily Dickinson describes the predicament of man in terms of the fight. The images in the poem are from war. Emily Dickinson's tragic sense is vividly reflected in the poem. The poet celebrates the heroism of unnoticed inner clash.
The poem describes the slant rays of light in a winter afternoon. Winter symbolizes death and 'afternoon' further stands for death. So, the situation presented in the poem is that of a speaker contemplating the death-like winter afternoon. She is reminded of her ultimate end. The slants in the light of winter afternoons oppress the speaker like the sad and heavy cathedral tunes.
This poem is about the dead buried in the grave. The dead are described as the meek members of the resurrection" sleeping safe in their graves, which are described as 'alabaster chambers'. They remain there untouched by temporal processes like the mornings or noon. The 'alabastrine chambers' has a satin (of the coffin) as their rafter and stone (of the grave) as their roof. The comparison is a lithe far-fetched and reminds us of metaphysical conceits.
Apparently about a clock suddenly coming to a stop, the poem deals, in fact, with death and its deep philosophical and religious implications. Exploiting the age-old-superstition of a person dying when a clock stops, and using the conventional comparison of life to a clock. Emily Dickinson portrays death as a sudden breakdown of a Swiss-made clock, indeed, the Swiss-clock metaphor controls the whole poem. The implicit comparison of man's life to a mechanical device underlines as much the fragile nature of the physical life of man as it emphasizes the meaninglessness of human existence.
This is one of the finest, but strangely, the most neglected of Emily Dickinson's poems. This mystic poem deals with the old familiar poetic subjects--man and his relation to God and Nature. The splendor of Nature is an expression of the infinite glory and grandeur of God's creation. Man, the observer of Nature, assuming "vaster attitudes", may strut and fret his hour and then disappear from the scene.
Exultation is the going written in 1859, shows distinctive features of Dickinson's poetry. The main focus is on a feeling that becomes “divine intoxication”. The excitement of travel to the sea away from home, especially by an imprisoned soul in landlocked areas, is caught flawlessly in this short poem by Emily Dickinson.
This poem of Emily Dickinson, written in 1859, centers round the theme of life and death and its metaphorical meaning. The inn in this poem can be metaphorically the life and in another point of view it can be graveyard. If inn is taken as the symbol of life its interpretation goes like this.
The poem is, explicitly, about the end of summer and the commencement of the fall season. At this time, nature is unpredictable and birds migrate to other countries for the change of season. The poem presents with the economy and restraint, the entire charm and beauty of external nature with its humming bees and sophistries of June. But the real implication of the poem is to present the deceptive appearance of time.
This poem is her most famous and a gentle defense of the privacy she preferred. The present poem is often quoted as an example of modesty of Emily Dickinson. The poem seems to be an illustration of Emily Dickinson's self-exile in a private world of her own. The result of her self-imposed exile was that she remained insignificant during her lifetime. She was nobody in the world.