Andrew Manning
Matt Thomas
Language Arts 11
October 22, 2007
Don’t worry, Be Happy
Welcome to my last response paper I am doing for Matt Thomas’ class. This is on an Emily Dickinson poem about someone being happy to die and how other people felt about her death. “So satisfied to go/Where none of us should be,/Immediately — that Anguish stooped/Almost to Jealousy —” . I thought I would dive into the sub pits of this poem and attempt to brutally dig out the reason why Emily wrote this poem
When I analyzed the poem literally, I saw that the people mourning over her are jealous because they know that she is in a better place. They probably got a lot of garbage being thrown around in their lives; I think that they would feel better dead than alive. It’s like they give themselves a death wish, or they become suicidal. I have actually seen people who hate their life so bad that have made arrangements for mass suicide to go the better place. Like the Sicarii Jewish people, way back in 70 A.D. They killed themselves so that they wouldn’t have to deal with the horror of the invading Romans. Maybe Emily Dickenson wrote that poem about those kinds of people. But I am a fan of Emily Dickinson, and I think she wouldn’t write a poem so ridiculously literal.
The girl in the poem, after analyzing her metaphorically, may not have died, but instead “killed” a part of her that she did not want, but everyone she knew thought she was stupid for getting rid of it. But then after seeing how great she was after she killed a part of herself, they all felt jealous of how happy she was. This actually happens a lot today, when you think about it. One example would be of this one person, whose name I have forgotten, who lives in Nevada. That man actually got rid of something undesirable, his gender. So he is no longer a man, but a woman. Everyone thought she was an idiot for doing such a thing. And they never noticed how happy she was until she found a perfect for herself, a man that was once a woman. Then her friends felt jealous of how true their love of those two was.
Who knows what the reason is for the existence of this poem. I have given you two possible reasons (and I think my metaphorical reason is most likely the real solution). But again I say who know what the reason is. There is no possible way to know exactly why Emily wrote this poem unless she tells us why. We can only guess and hope we are getting closer. That marks the end of my last response paper. But I want to give you one last remarkable statement.
Emily Dickenson is Awesome!
