Emily Dickinson We Pray To Heaven

Emily Dickinson, a poet of great repute, went beyond the social norms of her era with her poems, such as her stance on religion. Dickinson, being that she lived in her father’s house throughout most of her adult life, secretly wrote to herself many secular poems and expressed her initial doubts about religion. Emily Dickinson, uses her poetry to escape from her family’s beliefs. Dickinson does this through her expression of her lack of choice in “I’m Ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs”, and her feelings towards religion in “We pray—to Heaven — “. In her two poems, Dickinson expresses in a physical way her growing feeling of secularism and her want of choice in whether she believes in religion. Dickinson also gains newfound confidence in both these

Dickinson begins the first stanza by conveying her dismissiveness when people “pray—to Heaven— “, by having it parallel to the second line stating that “We prate—of Heaven— “(489). Dickinson does this to mock prayer and seems to also question what’s its purpose. In the second stanza, Dickinson begins to question Heaven itself asking if it was “a Place —a Sky—a Tree?”, She tries to deviate from society’s views of Heaven (6). Dickinson chooses to name Heaven as aspects of nature, which had been one of her favorite subjects in many of her poems, though she does choose to ask if it was “a Sky” and not if was “the Sky”, which was chosen by her to limit Heaven’s overall power (6). To Dickinson, Heaven is a subjective term and can be seen differently by many other points of view. Dickinson conveys this by stating that “Unto the Dead/There’s no Geography— “, Heaven even to the dead is subjective and that it is not a specific place but a concept for many people. Dickinson proceeds to end the poem with a question “Where —Omnipresence—fly?”, Dickinson states this question with ambiguity to prompt the Reader to try to answer. With this final line, Dickinson gives the reader a chance to answer the question of religion. A question which Dickinson has never been asked before and of which she has gained the confidence to ask, in this