‘So I conclude that space and time are things of the body and have little to do with our selves. My Country is Truth.’ (Emily Dickinson to Joseph Lyman) Discuss space, or time, or truth, in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. (2000 words)

For Emily Dickinson, despite being a subjective “thing of the body”, time is essential to the construction of her poetic worlds. The association of time and temporality with mortal life and transience allows for a deeper exploration of the atemporal “stasis of eternity” and immortality representing her understanding of life after death, as seen in poems such as “Behind me dips Eternity- Before me Immortality (721)’ and ‘It was not death, for I stood up’(75).1 In manipulating temporality to explore the difference between life and afterlife in these poems, she also reacts to the deterministic Calvinist doctrines on life after death, and it is also inability of man to comprehend fully transcendental states is often partly due to the restrictions that temporal thought place on the human mind, disabling us from making such absolute doctrines. Indeed Dickinson believed that the “poetic commitment was to rendering experience as continuous movement rather than categorical classification”, and so her explorations take place through human experiences and feelings over objective arguments. Finally, death forms the bridge between the mortal and immortal states, and so the uses of time in her explorations of death such as in ‘Because I could not stop for Death (479) are also particularly useful.

It is seen throughout these three poems, that Dickinson comprehensively uses time to construct a philosophy both of the difference between life and after-life, but also recognises that “the self has no empirical means of apprehending a transcendent realm”. Thus she avoids absolutely defining either mortal or immortal realm, choosing to focus instead on the experience of the individual, once again returning to the belief that “space and time are things of the body” rather than of the “self” or “mind”, and always considering both states of being, even when they are separated. Thus it is in “the imagination of the artist rather than through philosophical thought or religious faith” that we are able to “break out of the bondage of time into eternity” through Dickinson’s treatment of the human experience of time both in and after mortal life, and this can perhaps explain how her work is still able to teach and move us to this present day.