SOURCE: “‘Dickinson and the Process of Death,” in Dickinson Studies, No. 77, 1st Half, 1991, pp. 33-43.

In the following essay, Hendrickson explores Dickinson's curiosity about the moment of death and demonstrates how her poetry appeals to the senses as a means to understanding the experience of dying.

While many books and articles have been written on the topic of Emily Dickinson's death poems, virtually nothing has been published about her moment of death poems. On rare occasions, scholars have mentioned the moment of death poems as a subcategory of her death poems. In researching this paper, I found nothing which dealt with this topic any further. This is unfortunate, because the most fascinating of ED's [Emily Dickinson's] death poems involve the description of the very moment of death. Some of these poems are seen thru the eyes of a bystander, and some are seen thru the eyes of the...