Emily Dickinson’s masterfully crafted and innovative poetry chronicles both her celebrations and her despairs, and in the process reveals her personality and illustrates her wholly original use of language. Dickinson’s poetry is easily identifiable by her prolific use of dashes and eccentric use of capitals, but there is much more to her writing than her unique punctuation. Writing was clearly cathartic for Dickinson, and, as she never anticipated an audience, her poems are searingly honest expressions of her truest feelings. Her confessional poetry reveals a complex, wounded woman vacillating between extreme despair and ecstatic celebration, but it is also astonishingly well-written and lucid.
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‘The Soul has Bandaged moments’ reveals Dickinson as a prisoner of her own emotions. The personification of despair effectively conveys its devastating impact on her - ‘She feels some ghastly Fright come up/ And stop to look at her’ - as does the disturbing language, with its intimations of violation: ‘Salute her – with long fingers -/ Caress her freezing hair’. Contrast is used to show the joy she is also capable of feeling when she manages to break the shackles of despair: ‘The soul has moments of Escape -/ When bursting all the doors’. The simile of a bomb is a curious, but potent one: ‘She dances like a Bomb, abroad’. This shows how polarised her emotions were, as her celebrations were almost as overwhelming as her despairs. The metaphor of a criminal really illustrates the prison that despair can be: ‘Felon led along,/ With shackles on the plumed feet’. Even someone with wings on their feet cannot fly when they are in chains. I felt really sorry for Dickinson’s ‘bandaged’ and wounded soul having read this astonishing poem.
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Dickinson’s captivating poetry gives us a fascinating insight into the emotions of joy and misery and reveal her complex inner psyche. Her poetry is so poignantly truthful that it is always interesting to read, and her expressive language makes her readers feel everything she describes. The contrast between the boundless joy we witness in many poems and the heart-rending despair we see in others gives us a sense of how conflicted and overwhelmed she must have been in her life, and a greater sense of her intense and fascinating personality than any biographical details ever could.
