What Is Trauma In Emily Dickinson

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A severe trauma Emily Dickinson suffered in September 1862 (for an unknown reason) and death of her nephew, Gilbert Dickinson, are the reasons why she uses the word “twice” to refer to two death-like events she experienced. In her poem “My life closed twice before its close—”, she mentions two extremely and tragic events that occurred in her life which made her feel like if she had already experienced death two times before she even actually died. A severe trauma Emily Dickinson suffered in September 1862 (for an unknown reason) is one of the death-like events she experienced. The article Emily Dickinson’s Legacy Is Incomplete Without Discussing Trauma by The Establishments states that Emily Dickinson wrote many letters to her mentor, Thomas…show more content…
Dickinson suffered with deaths of many loved ones, as a result of her agony, many of her poems’ theme is death. The Emily Dickinson Museum states that “Dickinson also endured the loss of several close friends - Charles Wadsworth, Judge Otis P. Lord, and Helen Hunt Jackson - and several family members, including Gib and her mother” (Trustees of Amherst College) that affected her a lot because they were the only people she had a close relationship with and maintained contact with, due to the fact that she lived in almost complete isolation, hence these calamitous events devastated her and where the inspiration for many deaths themed poems. However, the death that impacted her the most was of her nephew Gilbert Dickinson because as Emily Dickinson Museum site on Emily Dickinson and Death states that “from the time her nephew Gib died in October 1883 she suffered a consequent nervous prostration” (Trustees of Amherst College) moreover, they assure that Emily had several blackouts, as a consequence, before her near death she was very delicate and restricted for a few months to only stay in bed, thus it was hard for her to overcome his death and it was considered to her a death-like experience. She got ill after the extreme suffering of Gilbert’s death, this means that she was very close to him and it was atrocious event in her life. The last stanza of the poem helps readers…show more content…
Emily Dickinson’s poem “I never lost as much but twice (49)” talks about how she begged at God’s door twice as she saw angels descending from heaven twice, and the first line tells us that she has never lost as much but two times. This shows that she went through traumas in her life before “its close” and they felt like if she saw the angels coming to get her, meaning that she felt like is she was about to die and had no escape. In the next lines she says that God “Reimbursed [her] store” (Dickinson 6) which complements to the theory of her eyesight problem. To reimburse is to payback, meaning that, God did not take Emily’s eyesight after all, she never became blind. As mentioned before, she even went to treatments meaning that her eyesight got better. However, in the next line she insults God and claims she is “poor once again” (Dickinson 8) which means that, after her eyesight complication was resolved, there was other tragic event that caused her to feel devastated and she even went to the extremes of insulting God because of it. This second trauma was death because she calls God a “Burglar” which is someone that steals, God took from her someone she loved. These two events in her life overwhelmed Dickinson before her life’s “close” and did not let her even imagine if she was able to handle another similar crisis. A severe trauma Emily
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