“This is my letter to the World/that never wrote to me.” I think these words reveal that Emily Dickinson is a very lonely person. She is insignificant compared to the vast world outside her house. I think she believes that individual people are insignificant, so they shouldn’t try to become too famous. I think that’s why she never got her poems published, because she knows she will become very famous after she does so. She becomes like a hermit after some incident happened, and locked herself up to isolate herself from the outside world. Another interpretation that seems more reasonable is about her friends. She once said: "... some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep” She had a great fear that she will eventually lose all her friends, and the fear intensified as her friends died one by one. I think that is the reason why she locked herself up, all of her friends in the outside world are gone, and so she prefers to stay inside. She often writes letters to her friends, she wrote over 300 hundred letters to her dearest friend, Susan Gilbert. After seeing her biography, I think I can now understand the meaning of the phrase mentioned above. “This is my letter to the World/that never wrote to me.” She writes to her friends, but all her friends are gone, so no one replies to her anymore. I think by the World she meant the people she knows in the outside world. Now that the world is gone, she might as well stay in her house for the rest of her life.
No comments:
Post a Comment