Bi sexuality of emily dickinson Essay - 1238 Words

Bi sexuality of emily dickinson The inner-workings of Emily Dickinson’s mind continue to be an enigma to literary scholars, worldwide. Dickinson’s agoraphobia caused her to live a solitary and secluded life in her Amherst, Massachusetts home for a large portion of her life. â€Å"She rarely received visitors, and in her mature years she never went out† (Ferguson, et. al.; 1895). It is also known that she was in love with a married man (no one knows for sure exactly who this man was) who eventually ended their relationship and this left her very distraught. Some scholars believe that at one point in her life, Dickinson suffered a nervous breakdown, possibly caused by the break-up of the relationship. A woman named Rebecca Patterson†¦show more content†¦Many of Dickinson’s love poems had sexual undertones. There is an apparent difference between the sexually explicit poems that were written to men from the ones that were written to women. Poem # 61 6 is an example of a poem that was written to a man. This poem blatantly exhibits Dickinson’s sexual intercourse with a man and more specifically her description of an orgasm. The first stanza has both Dickinson and her lover orgasm at the same time. Just as her lover is reaching his sexual peak, Dickinson (much to her surprise) started to reach hers. In the second stanza Dickinson states, â€Å"I sang firm-even-chants,† she is describing the feelings of rapture and bliss that she experiences as she is going through the orgasm. The third stanza describes the connection or closeness that they felt as their bodies soothed and recovered from their moment of ecstasy. The fourth stanza acts as an ode to her companion’s â€Å"low Arch of Flesh† (penis), which brought her so much pleasure. The fifth stanza in the poem is an expression of the joyous sentiments she felt after having experienced something as inexplicably pleasurable as an orgasm. In the last stanza Dickinson refers to the power and control that she has over man’s quest for sexual climax. The sexual poems that Dickinson wrote to or about women were more discreet t han what she exhibited in poem # 616. In poem # 211 Dickinson uses nature as a metaphor