Emily Dickinson Q: Discuss Emily Dickinson’s treatment of/ attitude to Nature. Or Consider Emily Dickinson as a poet of Nature.

Emily Dickinson’s nature poems may be divided into those that are chiefly presentations of senses appreciated for their loveliness and beauty, and those in which aspects of Nature are scrutinized for keys to the meaning of the universe and human life. This distinction helps us to understand the deeper significances in more scenic poems and the pictorial elements in more philosopher poems of Emily Dickinson.

                            In the popular poem “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”, Emily Dickinson is highly emotional and sensuous in her attitude to nature. Her mood reminds us of Keats’s sensuous presentation of nature phenomena. The poet presents herself as a drunkard who tastes a liquor never brewed. She is so much intoxicated and over thrilled at the loveliness and freshness of natural phenomena such as air, dew, summer day and blue sky that she has become crazy. She rightly reveals her mood:

                     “Inebriate of air I am,

                      And debauched of dew,

                     Reeling through endless summer days,

                     From inns of molten blue.”

Thus Dickinson creates her scene of endless summer in a very few images, the images of Molten blue and the relatively simple images of bees, flowers and beautiful butterflies being sufficient. Gradually the poem develops from a mood of physical sensuousness to a spiritual and mystic level.