Emily Dickinson’s Treatment of the Theme of Immortality

 
Dickinson was preoccupied with the questions of death and immortality. She was inquisitive about any mystery and her perplexity about it caused her poetic tension. The questions of belief and doubt centering round immortality wished that the soul never changed yet she denied the orthodox vision of paradise. However her confidence that love was an enduring entity supported her hope of immortality. She might have been in doubt sometimes that death was the gateway to immortality but she firmly believed that the soul’s identity could never be lost. She seems to have surveyed every domain of immortality and examined its relationship with death and life.

Dickinson’s early poems depict the progress of her belief from life to death. In some of her poems Dickinson asserts her firm faith in the immortality of soul. ‘Two lengths has Everyday’ logically argues that the identity of soul cannot be lost because it is immortal. The soul not only perceives an object realistically but creates imaginatively its full image.