Calm in Death

            While reading poem #479 by Emily Dickenson, I was surprised at the calm demeanor with which the subject of death is discussed. Normally people view death as a frightening, dreaded part of life. However, Emily Dickenson describes death in the same manner that she would discuss an acquaintance or friend. Death is portrayed as kind, quick, and polite, a far cry from the typical portrayals of death as evil, violent, and often slow and agonizing. She even capitalizes the word Death making it more than just a simple fact of life but a personified object. Death is the subject of many of Dickenson’s poems, so perhaps in her writing she came to terms with death, which is why Death is treated as an acquaintance or friend rather than an adversary.

            After reading the poem several times, I found this poem had a calming effect over me in regards to death. Through this poem, Dickenson reminds me that my attitude toward death should not be one of fear and dread, but one of acceptance. She points to the fact that death is inevitable when she says “Because I could not stop for Death -/He kindly stopped for me” (Dickenson 1-2). However, she is not scared when this inevitable thing happens but rather welcomes it. She gives up the things she loves and watches the world around her, as she never has before. Then she describes how great it is to live eternally. I found myself no longer dreading death by the end of the poem because it is inevitable and because centuries feel shorter than a day in the afterlife. There is nothing to dread about death because you get to live for eternity. It makes me wonder what faith Emily Dickenson was or if she was of any faith at all. She takes a very Christian approach to the afterlife. Overall I found the calm nature with which she regards death soothing. 

What would God do?

            While reading Mark Twain’s “Letters from Earth,” I couldn’t help but wonder what God would have thought of Satan’s observations, particularly those observations he makes in regards to what heaven is like in the human mind. At the beginning of the story God discusses what humans will be like. He says he will “put into each individual, in differing shades and degrees, all the various Moral Qualities, in mass, that have been distributed… among the non speaking animal world” (Twain 309). Here it seems that God wants all humans to be unique and that no two people in the world will be alike.

            However, as the story goes on and Satan reports back to Gabriel and Michael from Earth, the humans Satan describes are far from God’s vision. While humans are described as being unique from each other on Earth, as God had intended, they all strive to be the same in Heaven. Satan first describes the diversity among men and their intellects pointing out that every man “possesses a skill of some kind and takes a keen pleasure in testing it, proving it, perfecting it” (Twain 311). In other words, every man attempts to make his individual traits shine. However, all men strive to go to Heaven, where, according to man, everyone is the same. In Heaven, according to man, everyone sings, everyone plays the harp, and everyone is celibate.

            After reading Satan’s description of man’s Heaven, it is not hard to believe that God would have been ashamed of humans for making their ultimate goal to become like each other. God worked hard to make each individual human unique and in return human’s all try to act like each other in order to make it to Heaven where they will all essentially be clones of each other. If God would have read Satan’s letters, he could have gained some insight into human beings that he may not have seen because he is biased to love them. Perhaps, if God had read Satan’s letter, the human race would have been destroyed and started over again.

Twain, Mark. "Letters From Earth." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2007. Print.