1.1 What is Mysticism?

Mysticism involves a deep, almost obsessive, concern with such problems as death, the existence of the
soul, immortality, the existence of God and heaven, salvation or redemption, etc. Mysticism also means
the capacity to establish a spiritual contact with God. The mystic is a visionary who claims to hold a
direct communion with the Divine Spirit. Conrad (2000) describes mysticism as an effort that involves
both, the body and the mind, the whole human being, who should achieve. It’s an effort to defeat and
overcome death, something which a realist may find foolish and nonsense. According to Bray (2015),
Miss Dickinson “uses strategies of constriction, reduction and anticipation to attempt to control the
overwhelming mystical experience of Being” (n. p). According to Clements (2012, as cited in Saavedra-
Carballido, 2015) Mysticism is “through which one sheds or suppresses the rational mental constructs
that form, organize, and distort immediate experience, in order to experience the world without
mediation.” In this way, Mysticism can be connected to the unconscious and subconscious. A glance at
the themes of Miss Dickinson’s poetry, according to Sherwood, (1968), reveals an extreme
preoccupation with the effect of death, the nature of the soul, the problem of immortality, the possibility
of faith, and the reality of God. Miss Dickinson had a bad experience with death since she was young.
This experience is best illustrated by the words of Chunyan.

Dickinson’s mystic view on love

Dickinson’s mystic view on love has been expressed in a superb way in the following lines:

‘Unable are the loved to die.

For love is immortality.’

These lines reveal that man must die with love and only love can make a man immortal because love is
immortal itself. Love is eternal in this world that presides over the human heart.

Dickinson gives priority to spiritual or mystic love than sensational love. In the poem, “Wild Nights Wild
Nights”, Dickinson refers to her lover as “thee” but who is thee is obscure. She anticipates;

Rowing in Eden-

Ah- the sea!

Might I but moor- tonight-

In thee!

Dickinson relates that passing a night with her lover is luxurious and she wants to row by boat with her
lover in the sea of Eden. Here rowing by boat in the sea of Eden reveals mysticism. Passing a night with
her lover was normal and sensational love but rowing by boat in the sea exposes spiritual or mystic love.

Mystic attitude to death

The poet writes more than 1800 poems. According to critics, Dickinson’s 500 poems are based on the
theme of “death”. She represents death as a mystic element. The poem “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” is a
luminous example of the mysticism of death. She remarks;

“I felt a funeral in my brain

And mourners to andseeme

Kept treading- treading-till it’s seemed

That sense was breaking through”

She feels funeral in her brain. She gives the whole description after death in meditation. Throughout the
poem, Dickinson unlocks spiritual development through death. From a surface level, it is a poem dealing
with sufferings and pains but from a deeper level, it reveals the spiritual development and mysticism of
death. In the poem “Because I Could not Stop for Death”, She opens the poem declaring mysticism,

Because I could not stop for death-

He kindly stopped for me-

The carriage held by just ourselves-

And immortality.

Dickinson in these lines declares about the journey of death. It is a spiritual journey, the journey of the
soul. It’s impossible to think but this journey is possible from a Psychological point of view.

Mystic Viewpoint to Nature

Dickinson writes poems based on nature. So, romantic elements like high imagination, subjectivity, and
description of nature are found. But through nature, she shows the existence of god-like the pantheist. “I
Taste a Liquor Never Brewed” is a nature-based poem that reveals mysticism loving nature. Nature is
simple from outward but inwardly it creates a connection with god. She finds God’s existence. The
symbols of the poem are the sun, wind, seraph, or angel. These are the symbol of mysticism because
through these elements she tries to make a relationship with God.

Mystic Attitude to Immortality

A human being is mortal, but he can attain immortality after his death. Death helps a man to be free.
“Because I Could not Stop for Death” is a poem of immortality. The first four lines expose that we are
roaming with death and death is our ever companion. According to Dickinson, without death,
immortality cannot be gained. Her mystic attitude is clear from this speech. The last four lines of the
poem provide the notes of immortality and eternity-

Tis centuries- and yet

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the Horses heads

Were toward eternity.

After death, a man gets relief from prison (body or physical structure) and starts his journey to
immortality.

Firm mystic Belief in the immortality of the soul

Man dies physically but his soul remains alive. After physical death, his soul becomes free and starts a
new journey. Dickinson believes that there is another world after death where there are no pains and
sufferings. She refers;

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond –

Invisible, as Music –

But positive, as Sound –

It beckons, and it baffles –

She asserts here in this poem that music cannot be seen but we can feel in our heart. Like music, the
soul is invisible, and the journey of the soul can never be seen. Here the mysticism is revealed vividly.

Conclusion
To Conclude, Dickinson is a mysterious person. So, her poems also sketch mysticism perfectly..2 Two
Kinds of Mysticism

Two Kinds of Mysticism

The American poet Emily Dickinson’s thoughtful concern with the problems of life, death, and
immortality has led to the view that she is a mystical poet. It is worthwhile examining the nature of her
mysticism (Miller, 1968). We must remember, however, that there is a difference between a Christian
mystic and a non-Christian mystic. The three main stages of all mysticism are purgation, contemplation,
and union; and these three stages are developed into the three ways of the Christian mystic: purgative,
illuminative and unitive. But essentially Christian mysticism differs from non-Christian mysticism, chiefly
through the Christian belief in the Incarnation of Christ. The Christian mystic possesses a model, an
inspiration, a mediator, and an object of his love in the person of Jesus Christ. The following words clarify
how the poet can often be compared to

The presence of salvific love in her life came with

the insistence that she identifies with the purpose and

mission of Jesus of Nazareth, and her writing centers on

that mission, never more clearly than at the end of her

life when, like Jesus, she offered her love to those who

would mourn her. (Harde, 2004, p. 18)

Further, the purificatory process in Christian mysticism is not that of the Platonic ascent 1. For the
Christian mystic holds the doctrine of sin, and he is deeply concerned with his personal guilt. Sin, as
related to the Incarnation and the Redemption, inspires in him a sense not only of shame but of sorrow
and of love as well. To identify and judge the poetry of Emily Dickinson, this paper, through the analytical
style, will try to shed light on and critically examine some of her major poems in order to determine the
degree of mysticism in her poetry.
No Desire for Union with God in Her Poetry
What was the relation of Emily Dickinson’s soul to what she conceived as Absolute Reality? Leaving aside
a few flippant references, her poetry seems to manifest a sincere and abiding faith in God. Of course, her
ideas of God appear to fluctuate, but one need not doubt that “she believed in God and in the things of
the spirit” (Sewall, 1974, p. 5). However, we cannot say that her belief was enriched by anycontemplative
vision of God or even by a desire for such a vision. Pickard (1967) is of the view that “death and heaven
were the objects of constant speculation with Miss Dickinson, almost to the point of obsession, but her
speculation was not that communion with the Divine which the mystic longs for” (p. 16). Her speculation
was imaginative and entirely based upon sensory experience. Such thoughts are found in “Great Streets
of Silence Led Away,” “I Went to Heaven,” “I Died for Beauty,” “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers,”
“Ample Make This Bed,” and “What Inn is This,” as well as many others. Death is seen in these poems as
inevitable, its experience indefinable, except in terms of what we know on earth. Union with God was to
be reserved until death, for there was no venture into the supernatural beyond the realm of ideas for
Miss Dickinson. For this reason, probably, there is none of that longing for death, which the mystic
expresses, the result of his communing with God while he remains in the flesh. To consider the following
stanza from her poem “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” (1861), which deals with the relation between
death and immortality, would be worthy:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—

Untouched by Morning

And untouched by Noon—

Lie the meek members of the Resurrection—

Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone! (No. 216)

As indicated above, this first stanza expresses a religious view of death, with a confident belief in
personal immortality. The stanza also gives us a thought about the dead, who were faithful in life and,
are peacefully asleep in their graves. At the beginning, the possibility of immortal life is divorced from all
wishful motivations, such as a desire for reunion with the beloved, and made to stand on its own
theological legs if it can, but this comes into conflict with the cold astronomical concept of eternity in the
end. Again this first stanza echoes the language of the Bible and of Protestant hymns, especially in the
two long lines that establish with quiet assurance the coming Resurrection of the meek who lie “safe in
their “sleep.” But the short antiphonal lines undercut these orthodox affirmations of faith by reminding
us that this is a cold white prison locking out the golden sunshine. Her treatment of the Resurrection is
here somewhat orthodox though the emphasis is no more doctrinal than it is mortuary. She achieves
objectivity by concentrating on the frozen expectancy of the tombstone, and she achieves irony by
implying the skeletons beneath in terms of what they are deprived of. The peace of the grave, in one
sense, results from the loss of consciousness. The image of the “meek members” openly satirizes the
Book of Revelation’s account of the assembled elect and presents them as timid time-servers, “whose
goodness resulted from their fears or damnation and from society’s pressures” Wells (1959, p. 160). The
sing-song final lines suggest that their religious convictions are superficial, a decorative coating which
cannot conquer the stone reality of death. The words “morning” and noon” suggest that the dead are
untouched by the occurrences of this world. Therefore the dead are safe, asleep, abiding without motion
or sound, protected by marble and stone, outside time and change until the Resurrection.

No True Mystic Quest in Her Poetry

In Miss Dickinson’s poetry, we do indeed find that intense sensitivity to experience which is characteristic
of the mystic. Duncan (1965) is of the opinion that Dickinson’s self-chosen isolation from the world might
easily be interpreted as the retirement for contemplation which a mystic practices. But the writing which
came out of this solitude does not tell the story of the mystic quest. Her poems seem to evoke the
picture of one whose intellectual and emotional equipment for life was extraordinary in perception and
depth. There is a deliberate contraction of the circle of experience, and within that circle, the ultimate
meaning of each act is traced to its end; experience is related to experience by metaphor; intense
conviction of truth is pointed by personification. But there is never the deliberate putting by even of the
minimum which could be called the asceticism of the mystic. Miss Dickinson’s assertion after her mother
left Amherst for Pittsfield: “The time to live is frugal and, good as it is, a better

earth will not quite be this” (1878, p. 2) is not the statement of an ascetic.

Her Poetic Goal

Intellectual discipline in Miss Dickinson means precision of thought and an adequate relationship of the
unique happening to its place in her scheme of things; it is the withdrawal into contemplation by which
the mystic seeks to establish contact with Ultimate Reality. Her immediate goal, poetic expression, is
defined in her own lines:

This was a Poet — It is That

Distills amazing sense

From ordinary Meanings —

And Attar so immense

From the familiar species

That perished by the Door —

We wonder it was not Ourselves

Arrested it — before — (No. 448)

This is a piece of the poem that puts emphasis upon the poet’s construction of a poem, which the word
“distillation” in the second line of the first stanza came from the sense of distillation of alcohol and
perfume. This particular stanza suggests that the meanings and images the poet puts on the page would
fill up the room, as immense as “Attar.” The first line of the second stanza, the phrase, “familiar species,”
suggest the sense of ordinary meanings in the poem, the surface meaning of the poem. Finally,
Dickinson portrays in the last stanza in the second line with the word “Robbing,” which suggests that
when we read the poet’s poetry, we would be stealing something from him. However, Dickinson suggests
in the following lines that designate that this act would not bring harm to the poet at all; rather, it would
become a fortune through time for the poet, which designates the sense of the fame and poems of the
poet living on.

Mystically Inclined
As has been said by Gelpi (1965), although Miss Dickinson was not a philosopher, nor even a consistent
thinker, “she strikingly illuminated the hidden recesses in the human soul” (p. 4). Unlike most American
poets, she was religiously oriented. A glance at her themes reveals an extreme preoccupation with the
effect of death, the nature of the soul, the problems of immortality, the possibility of faith, and the
reality of God. Certainly, in the sense that she sought the essential moral truths veiled behind material
appearance and strove to experience and perceive the divine force (or “circumference,” as she called it),
she was mystically inclined. Antony and Dewan (2012) assert the fact that “Being a mystic she believes in
the deathlessness of death” (p. 2). What their words mean is that death is only second to God. Death,
according to Antony and Dewan is a very powerful free agent. All things vanish with the passage of time,
all things except God. “This undoubtedly confirms the immortality of death and reinforces its divine
nature” (p. 2), added Aantony and Dewan.

Her Calvinistic Upbringing

Although later influenced by Transcendentalism, Miss Dickinson was reared in an Orthodox tradition,
where Biblical truths were stated in Calvinistic terms. Nor did she ever eradicate the hardcore of these
beliefs from her philosophy. The basic Calvinistic approach maintained that man was depraved and
conditioned to evil by original sin, and that he was utterly dependent on God for any good that he might
accomplish. Further, this God was absolute and arbitrary, freely deciding to save or to damn. According
to Farzana (2016), “Her real reverence to God that makes her a mystic lies in a more manifest and more
beautiful evidence of divine will than creeds and churches” (p. 1). Knowing men’s fate beforehand, God
predestined the course of their lives. Allied to this was the concept of irresistible grace; that is, once
given, it could not be refused or lost. The key words in this context were sanctification and justification.
One was “justified” when God gave him the grace necessary for a good life and “sanctified” when he
continued to prove his election by living an acceptable Christian life. Underlying this whole complex
structure was the belief that God directed all men’s acts and behaviors.

A Rebel against religious Orthodoxy

In nineteenth-century Amherst, these Calvinistic beliefs were not so rigidly enforced, and anyone who so
desired could declare his own justification and become one of the elect. All that was needed was a
willingness to attend church regularly and to manifest a moral life. Even this as too much for Miss
Dickinson. Deppman (2008) stated that “Dickinson’s attraction to Emerson and Transcendentalism, her
commitment to a new poetics, her various emphases on the mind as an active, dangerous, and powerful
experimental agent, and her idiosyncratic departure from religious orthodoxy share this lineage” (p. 32).
She found herself a rebel and quite mystified by the doctrine of election. During the 1850s, she stopped
attending church and noted that all her family members were religious except herself. Bythis, she meant
that she could not accept the harsh dogmas of innate depravity, arbitrary election, and predestination,
or treat the Bible as true history and the only moral guide for man. In other words, she rejected all that
made man insignificant and helpless before the crushing force of God. In many poems, like “Abraham to
kill him,” (No. 77) and “Of God we ask one favour,” (No. 1601), she satirizesthe orthodox belief that all
men are responsible for the sin of the first parents. Continually, she pictures God the father as an aloof
tyrant, indifferently dealing out blind punishments, unresponsive to prayer,and unconcerned about
human suffering. In one poem, “Heavenly Father-take to thee,” (1461), she ironically comments on God’s
duplicity for creating men with original sin and then condemning them for fulfilling their nature. As for
Christ, her attitude was marked by cautious ambivalence that emphasized his human rather than divine
qualities. Scheurich (2007) notes that “Her poems suggest a complex view of the ambiguous relation of
suffering to human action and meaning” (n. p.). However, if Miss Dickinson could not accept
conventional religion, she still retained unshakable trust in God’s actual reality and continually re-
examined older fundamental concepts like the Trinity, Resurrection, Hell, angels, and immortality.
Throughout her life, the ultimate mystery of immortality perplexed and intrigued her. Especially in her
later years, the problem obsessed her, but she remained a doubter until her death.

References to Paradise
Sometimes Miss Dickinson looks upon death as the gateway to the next existence, “Living in a rural
setting a century and a half ago, she was aware of the cycle of existence, from birth to death and birth
again. Most of the people also would have been aware of that cycle, living on farms, tending to animals,
watching the seasons change” (Antony & Dewan, 2012, p. 2), which is conceived of as a special glory
having something in common with the conventional paradises offered in the hymns and sermons of her
day, or with the Book of Revelation. Beyond the tomb, after the “white election,”God presides over an
opulent kingdom whose splendors are signified by Miss Dickinson with words like “purple,” “royal,”
“privilege,” “emerald,”“diadem,” and “courtier.” Such words and concepts help to reinforce herview of
immortality. In certain moods she can write in her poem

“The Only

News I Know”:

The only news I know

Is bulletins of day

From immortality.

The Only Shows I see

Tomorrow and Today

Perchance Eternity. (No. 827)

In the above poem, Dickinson sees the world as a cold place, devoid of any warmth or love, to
compensate for this loss; she often mentions God, Immortality and Eternity. This makes the readers start
visualizing a place where they desire to be. Although the poet thinks that she is deeply religious and
spiritual, she is unsure whether she will go there. Therefore, these places remain mysterious to human
beings, and only those who sacrifice will be rewarded by the Lord and might go there. Sometimes she
expresses posthumous beatitude, as in the following poem

“Great streets of silence led away”:

Great Streets of silence led away

To Neighborhoods of Pause —
Here was no Notice — no Dissent

No Universe — no laws —

By Clocks, ‘twas Morning, and for Night

The Bells at Distance called —

But Epoch had no basis here

For Period exhaled. (No. 1159)

This is technically a mystical poem: that is, it endeavors to render an experience which is foreign to all
human experience, yet to render it in terms of a modified human experience. The experience dealt with
here is that of rapt contemplation, eternal and immovable, which may be described as the condition of
beatitude. Yet there is no particular reason to believe that Emily Dickinson was a mystic or thought
herself a mystic. The poems of this variety and there are many of them, appear rather to be efforts to
dramatize an idea of salvation, intensely felt, but an idea essentially inexpressible. She deliberately
utilizes imagery irrelevant to the state with which she is concerned, because she cannot do otherwise;
yet the attitude toward the material, the attitude of rapt contemplation, is the attitude which she
probably expects to achieve toward something that she has never experienced. The poems are invariably
forced and somewhat theoretical; they are briskly clever, and lack the obscure but impassioned
conviction of the mystical poems of Very 3; they lack the tragic finality, the haunting sense of human
isolation in a foreign universe, to be found in her greatest poems of which the explicit theme is a denial
of this mystical trace.

A Mixture of Puritan and Free-Thinker

Like Emerson, Miss Dickinson was, from the beginning, and she remained all her life, a singular mixture
of Puritan and free-thinker. The problems of good and evil, of life and, obsessed her; the nature and
destiny of the human soul; and Emerson’s theory of compensation. Toward God, as one of her earliest
critics is reported to have said: “she exhibited an Emersonian self-possession.” Indeed, she did not, and
could not; accept the Puritan God at all. She was frankly irreverent on occasion, a fact which made her
editors a little uneasy. What she was irreverent to, of course, was thePuritan conception of God and the
Puritan attitude toward God. In her poem “Drowning” she observes:

The Maker’s cordial visage,

However good to see,

Is shunned, we must admit it,

Like an adversity. (No. 1718)

In one poem “Some keen tile Sabbath going to church” (No. 324), she refers to God as a “noted
clergyman” and on another occasion in the poem “I never lost as much but twice” (No. 49), she refers to
him as a “burglar, banker, father,” a flippancy which might have annoyed even the most liberalof her
contemporaries. But perhaps her perfect metaphysical detachment is most precisely and frankly stated
in the famous mock-prayer (In the Single Hound), in which addressing God, she impertinently apologizes
to Him for His “duplicity.”
Her Mystical Speculation
To see Miss Dickinson at her best and most profound, we must turn to the remarkable range of
metaphysical speculation and ironic introspection which we find in those poems that have been
classified by her editors as falling under the headings of “Life,” “Time” and “Eternity.” In thesepoems,
we have her set meditations on the nature of things. They have no trappings, only here and there a
purple patch. They may even appear to be too bare, bleak, and fragmentary. They could be regarded as
poems containing disembodied thought. The thought is there, hard, bright, and clear; and her symbols
and metaphors have comparable clarity and transparency. The following words can best illustrate the
point:

This tendency in Dickinson’s verses; he refers to the poet’s “self-corrections”: “Many poems circle around
a topic without ever reaching a conclusive statement. Often they repeat the definitional gesture by
introducing a series of metaphors, enhancing and seemingly refining the meaning and creating subtleties
of mood without following any apparent order or progression. (DEPPMAN, 2002, p. 54, as quoted in
Lorenzo, 2010, p. 82)

This clearly suggests that there is apparent cohesion between the different metaphors that Dickinson
uses in her poems. They seem to be jumbled together without any logical connection between them, or
without a clear distinction of their various meanings, something which may puzzle and confuse the
average reader of her poetry. For example, In her poem “The Brain – is wider than the Sky – “ the poet
relies on the metaphor of the container, “by asking if an unworthy man can ‘contain’ God, who is
measureless, and by wondering ‘what place is there” into which God might enter’” (Lorenz, 2010, p. 75).
Here the physical and the spiritual, the material with the abstract, have been liked and compared. Here
the metaphor may have so many different meanings, but the one explained above may be the exact
meaning. “In the case of dualistic thinking, Dickinson ponders the meaning of the body and the soul
throughout her writing, sometimes affirming or negating either or both” (Harde, 2004, p. 8). But she has
affirmed the superiority of the soul which can transcend the body and be united with God in the
afterlife.

Epigrammatic Style
We also have here a downright homeliness which is a source of constant surprise and delight. Miss
Dickinson here tunes up Emerson’s gnomic style to the epigrammatic. She often carries the
epigrammatic to the point of the cryptic; she becomes what we might call an epigrammatic symbolist

Lay this laurel on the one

Too intrinsic for renown.

Laurel! Veil your deathless tree,-

Him you chasten, that is he! (No. 1393)

This verges perilously on the riddle. Indeed, her passionate devotion to a concise statement in terms of
metaphor has left for us a small rich emblem of which the colors tease, the thought entices, but the
meaning escapes. Against this, however, should be seting her capacity for a wonderful simplicity
illustrated in such poems as “My Life Closed Twice before its Close,” (No. 1732). To quote the whole
poem is noteworthy in this respect:
My life closed twice before its close—

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell. (No.1732)

With a private female poet like Emily Dickinson, biographical facts become often necessary to provide
the key to the complete understanding of the above poem. The poem clearly states that the poetess has
suffered the “equivalent of physical death by two previous losses” Lindberg-Seyersted (1986, p. 8). Now
she wonders if Immortality (God or fate) has still another such event in store for her. According to
Johnson (1955) “Biographically the two losses could be Newton and Wadsworth; her separation from
Newton by physical death and her separation from Wadsworth by geographical distance and moral
barriers” (p. 52). Prophetically she wonders about a possible third figure (and one actually came in the
1870s with her passion for Judge Otis Lord). The second stanza concisely summarizes the overwhelming
sense of desolation that these losses produced. Parting reveals heaven, since its ecstasy rivals paradise,
besides emphasizing the soul’s dependence upon heaven for future happiness. At the same time, the
experience of hell comes in the anguish of separation. Lorenz (2010). Believes that “the poetry of Emily
Dickinson is heavily invested in exploring and representing the experience of ‘the sublime,’ a concept
that strongly influenced the Romantic poets” (p. 76). Farzana (2016) is of the opinion that “An interesting
aspect of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is that of her reverence for words in a way in which she frequently
uses terms of language and communication” (p. 12). This is what makes her ideas clearly stated to a
large number of audiences, and made the sublime clear and understandable by all.

Faith and Religious Conviction

Many of Miss Dickinson’s poems are certainly concerned with the Creator,the Redeemer, with death and
immortality. Her view of immortality is best illustrated by what has been stated by Flick (1967), who
believed that Chase finds it meaningful to account for her attitude toward immortality by relating it to
Gnosticism: According to him, “This extraordinary generalization of immortality, outside of history,
church, and dogma, clearly has the quality of Gnosticism” (pp. 19-20). For, like the Gnostic believer of all
ages, Miss Dickinson considers immortality as an almost Omni-present magic power, added Flick. What
Flick meant to say is that by trying to obscure the fact of death by speaking through suffering or
acquiring the whole truth, that the lucky individual may attain immortality in this life. Chase (1951)
himself states that “Emily Dickinson believed that the poet was indeed possessed at the moment of
utterance by that ‘spectral power in thought that walks alone’” (pp. 190-91). This suggests that the poet
has received some kind of illumination while writing her poetry. According to Flick (1967), so many of her
poems “can be seen as expressions of the Mystic Way of Death, which through purgation and
purification prepares for the supreme experience of unity” (p. 374). These are themes which might be
described as mystical in nature, and her poems on these themes are the fruit of a very deep insight
andan intensely emotional nature. But these poems do not belong to the body of that literature which is
based on the search of the mystic for God and for union with Him. There is faith, certainly, and religious
conviction; but nowhere is there that complete dedication to the search for perfection which motivates
the mystic.

CONCLUSION
The number of poems by Miss Dickinson on the subject of death is one of the most remarkable things
about her. As has seen in the discussion in this paper, Death, and the problem of life after death,
obsessed her. She thought of death constantly, she probed death daily; and we might say she died all her
life. Ultimately the obsession became morbid, and she developed an excessive desire to know the details
regarding how a particular individual had died. But the preoccupation, with its horrible uncertainties, its
doubts about immortality, its hatred of the flesh, and its many reversals of both positions, gave us her
sharpest work. The theme was inexhaustible for her. If her poetry seldom became “lyrical,” states Griffith
(1964) “seldom departed from the colorless sobriety of its bare iambics and toneless assonance, it did so
most of all when the subject was death” (p. 12). One searches in vain for the more particular signs of the
Christian mystic in the poetry of Miss Dickinson. The expression of personal guilt for sin, the feeling of
Christian humility, the symbol of earthly love used to explain the Divine, the ecstatic joy of union, and
the utter desolation of the “dark nights of the soul” (Moore, 2004, p. 2). All these are recorded in the
writings of the great mystics, but they are not found in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Mystical poetry, in
the traditional sense, at least, is not her special poetic gift.