The Theme of Pain in Emily Dickinson’s Major Poems

• Main Authors: Kan-yao Lee, 李柑腰
• Other Authors: Prof. Pen-shui Liao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/82010838478709982992

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 95 === Emily Dickinson, one of the talented and outstanding female poets, isolated herself after she was thirty years old or so. Biographers asserted that Dickinson suffered a series of pain in love affairs and physical pain. Dickinson’s poems, brief, mysterious, elliptical, and often epigrammatic, are meditations or the result of meditations on various themes. The main themes that we can find in her craft are usually divided into several groups: nature, love, death, immortality and so on. However, I would like to put the focus on the theme of pain and discuss some of her poems to understand how Dickinson observes the world through pain, a kind of psychic feelings. As Dickinson points out, pain apparently has an unmistakable character of being timeless and spaceless. She uses metaphors to convey an intensity of pain. This essay looks at the examples of Dickinson’s techniques of measurement to show some ways in which she claims pain as one of her main subjects. This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One introduces Dickinson’s family, her life, and the reasons of her seclusion. Chapter Two explores Dickinson’s experience of life. Her poems permit her to use her personal experience as a springboard for discussing philosophical and religious matters In Chapter Three, I would like to express that if people can not escape from the great pain, the continual stimulation of pain will soon be fatigued; they will have no strengths to resist it; and finally the extreme pain will cause men to get into the abyss of despair. The only way for them to be out of the abyss is death. In Chapter Four, I will discuss Dickinson’s opinion that pain is rewarding. Dickinson agrees that one of people’s main tasks is to accept the challenge, go through danger, experience failure, and bear pain, as well as to get the hope of remuneration, the reward of spirit, and the commitment of living forever from it. Chapter Five concludes that Dickinson describes “pain” bravely. It is true that she observes pain and teaches us to face it. By suffering pain we become mature, instead of being destroyed.