Emily Dickinson's backyard birds and bugs

Abstract

Emily Dickinson scholars have noted the importance of symbolism and imagery in her poetry, of which Emily Miller Budick’s Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language: a Study in Symbolic Poetics (1985), John Cody’s After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971), Thomas W. Ford’s Heaven Beguiles the Tired: Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1966) and Clark Griffith’s The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson’s Tragic Poetry (1964) stand out. Although their contribution to Dickinson’s scholarship is great, they seem to pay little attention or fail to appreciate Dickinson’s imagery and symbolism of birds and insects in her poetry. In this paper, I argue that avian and insectile creatures in Dickinson’s poetry are not mentioned purposelessly or randomly. Birds and insects are employed to express larger aspects of artistic creativity that go beyond the physical, musical, or habitual dimensions these creatures are normally associated with. It is through grasping the symbolism that a bird or an insect stands for that readers of her poetry can come closer to the intended meaning of the poems and therefore better appreciate and enjoy her poetry.