Emily Dickinson As Imperceptibly As Grief Analysis

Everyone will go through grief, at least once in his or her lifetime. It is not easy to go through grief. Grief conveys a negative energy and it always implies unfortunate things. In Emily Dickenson’s “As Imperceptibly as Grief”, the speaker expresses an emotion towards the process of letting grief pass by. Dickenson senses grief as darkness, but also an emotion that will fade away soon.

In the first line of the poem “As imperceptibly as grief” (1). Dickinson uses similes. She compares imperceptibly with grief. The word imperceptibly as defined in Webster’s Dictionary is “not noticeable by the senses or by the mind : very small or gradual.” This suggests that grief is not essential in life and people always forget about grief. This line projects a stereotypical definition of grief which has a negative connotation. Continuing with the first line “The summer lapsed away --” (2) and “Too Imperceptible, at last” (3) she implies grief is not an everlasting thing. It will just be like summer, which will eventually pass by. Dickinson uses personification in line 2 as if the summer is running away. In “To seem like perfidy” (4), the word pertidy means the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal. Again, speaker compares grief

While some would consider this to be a feeling of hope and healing, it isn’t presented as what we thought it would be in this poem. Instead, the speaker gives the impression that the feelings which come after grief are filled with emptiness that cannot be tolerated “thus, without a wing or service of a keel” (13-14). She also describes that the grief has faded away, just like the “summer made her light escape into the Beautiful” (15-16). It is almost as if the speaker wishes she could hold on to the grief she felt implying that this feeling was something beautiful, but now that it has escaped, she is left with nothing but a hollow emptiness where she wishes grief could