Dickinson Philosophy of Pain and Suffering and Growth
Dickinson’s poetic world is permeated with pain and suffering and the struggle of evade, face, overcome and wrest meaning from it or growing from it. Suffering is central to her poetic faith and it is involved in the creative processes as well. It is part of her ambivalent response to the mysteries of time and nature.
Love deprivation lies
behind many of her poems. ‘Renunciation is a piercing virtue’ deals with the
theme of her abandoning the hope of a beloved person. However she is less
visible here than in some of her poems where a lover is visible and is not
clear about the final meaning of her painful experience.
Some of her poems seal
with childhood deprivation. In them she is explicit about the source of her
suffering but they are less powerful than her general treatment of suffering. ‘pain
has an element of blank’ is one of her poems in which her anguish goes on
indefinitely. It is a timeless suffering, mental rather than physical. ‘After great
pain a formal feeling comes’ is Dickinson’s most popular poem about suffering
and one of her greatest poems. The pain is psychological here and there is no
real damage to the body and no pursuit of healing.
Some of Dickinson’s
poems about poetry and art reflect her belief that suffering is necessary for
creativity.
Poems on love and on
nature suggest that suffering will lead to a fulfillment of love or that the
fatality which she feels present in nature elevates her and sharpens her
sensibility.
Pain and suffering are
to Dickinson the very expression of eternity. The infinity of human suffering
is bought out in mystical terms in the poem ‘pain –has an element of blank.’
Pain is a consummate experience which paves the way for heaven. In ‘the
hallowing of pain’ the poet says that heaven is not achieved by one who labors
in the midway that is half heartedly but he reaches heaven who tries with
utmost pain to reach there. The road to heaven is covered with hurdles of pain.
Dickinson believes that
the happiest experiences of life become more vivid and picturesque and
therefore more memorable when they are seen from the vantage point and
suffering and anguish.
Dickinson was a great
poet of pain and suffering and growth and spiritual regeneration through them.
Her poetic feelings of such emotions are intense though they are sometimes
hidden beneath the garb of rhetorical figures.
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