Death: Final or Continuous?

     One thing that we have talked about numerous times is Death.  It has plagued writers mind's for centuries as they strive helplessly to understand the non-understandable. Death will forever be the world’s biggest mystery and we will always try to figure it out.  

      Most poets and writers of all kinds choose a side.  Some choose to see life as a circle; we are born from the earth, we live upon the earth, and when our life is at end, we go back into the ground.  We are one with nature again.  Others see Death as a journey to everlasting life.  They see Death as an inevitable force and though they don't want to die, they know that Death will prevail.   

     Two poets that display these contrasting views are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.  Walt Whitman sees death with more of a "hippy" view.  He believes that we come from the soil and go back into it.  In "Song of Myself", Whitman says "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" (lines 54-55).  Whitman knew that he was to return to the soil where he then, would be part of the earth and cycle of life.

     Dickinson looked at Death with a more somber and realistic tone.  She lived for most of her life next to a cemetery where she contemplated Death on a regular basis.  She personifies Death in "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" as well as portrays the idea that your body stops at the grave, but your soul continues on the journey to everlasting life.  In the first stanza Dickinson writes "Because I could not stop for Death, /He kindly stopped for me;” this shows the personification of Death, but also relates the word "kindly" to Death.  Though Dickinson chooses positive diction to describe Death, she knows that when death comes she has no choice but to go with him.  He may be kind, but that may be only out of pity or mockery because, unlike Whitman, Death is final in Dickinson's eyes.