Dickinson Vs Whitman

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Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are two great American poets from the nineteenth century. Both of these poets discuss different aspects of death in many of their poems. In Emily Dickinson’s I Heard a Fly Buzz death is boring and the speaker seems to think nothing of death. In her poem I Could Not Stop for Death she has death act in a nice way and says how death is a very long journey but feels short at the end. In her poem Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers the theme of death involves the idea that all life perishes eventually and that there is conduction with the idea of death and after death. Lastly the poem I Felt a Funeral in my Brain by Emily Dickinson talks of death being the unknown and torture to go through the motions of a death. Walt…show more content…
I n this poem death is heavy and there is the idea of crucifying Christ being related to the deaths of soldiers. Another poem by him that deals with death is called As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods. The aspects of death in this poem are how this poem shows how a soldier’s death haunts the speaker and this poem is a tribute the death of the solider. The last poem by Walt Whitman is When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. This poem shows the stages of grief in the death of a comrade and this poem also shows that death is necessary because it leads to rebirth. These poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman both have aspects of death in their poetry but the way they approach death and its resolution differently, with Emily Dickinson arguing that what comes after death is uncertain and that all life will go through death, while Walt Whitman believes in an afterlife along with the idea that death is awful but is…show more content…
The poem shows that the speaker is preparing for death and this death is the final end because Emily Dickinson use the term last which is a term the firmly ends a moment. The line that suggests this in I Heard a Fly Buzz is “for that last Onset–when the King” (7). This line shows that the death will be the beginning of something unpleasant and not the idea of an afterlife. The poem also shows further confirms that there is an uncertainty of an afterlife when the speaker proclaims to not being able to see anymore. The lines fifteen and sixteen are representative of this and they state “And then the Windows failed – and then/ I could not see to see -” (15-16). The dash at the end of the sixteenth line is a representation of the unfinished thoughts which is the unknowing of what comes after death do to the loss of understanding. This is different from Walt Whitman because death is an unknown for Emily Dickinson. She does not firmly believe that there is anything so she chooses to have death represent a dash because she is uncertain if anything could come next. The next poem Because I Could Not Stop For Death literally has death in the
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