Emily Dickinson: Sad Spinster (Part Two)

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Mar 2, 2001

She was a woman, full of life and vitality, who wrote constantly (as I do, so I can't admonish what the art did for her, emotionally). Some say the only way a woman can be fully realized is through poetry, since it maps our methods, our minds, theologies, reasons and revelations, and makes us know ourselves better.

I don't, however, feel that Emily's isolation or religious sense helped her, mentally, in the least. She becomes a guarded but sad subject in my eyes, for her loneliness and the artistic restriction of her time. She retreated to her words and isolated herself in the process.

Emily suggested we know God before death, because then it's too late be joking, a very sober and Christian thing to say. So, she kept herself locked away from the world, writing her "letter," from her home (as always) in Amherst. She died in 1886 (in Cambridge), but I'd prefer to end with just one of her poems. I think it would be appropriate, considering her works were found after she died (by her sister), and I felt this poem should've either been first or last in Robert Linscott's compilation:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,-
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

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