Emily Dickinson Support This Statement:

Emily Dickinson

Support this statement: Emily Dickinson questioned, satirized, and rejected the church, feeling its practices did not reflect her faith.

Emily Dickinson was a spiritual poet who disdained the need for liturgy and creed. In perhaps her most radical poem she writes: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -- / I keep it, staying at Home --/With a Bobolink for a Chorister --/and an Orchard, for a Dome" (324). For Dickinson, nature and solitude are more conducive to spirituality. She does not find her faith inside a man-made structure in the midst of a common crowd. She hates suffering the social pressures of conformity a congregation produces that has nothing to do with her personal sense of the divine.

Gently, Dickinson mocks those "gentlewomen," or "brittle ladies" of piety, those: "Soft -- Cherubic Creatures" who enforce morality but really possess a "freckled Human Nature," just as sinful beneath their softness as the people they criticize (410). Church practice creates a spirit of judgment, not Christian tolerance. The ladies express refined horror at nonconformity in the language of their church, but have little to say that is really reflective of God.

It is not God Dickenson mocks, but those who claim to speak in His name. She dislikes the way that members of the church use the name God to enforce their own temporal values and thoughts of sin. Although Dickinson believed: "This World is not Conclusion," she added the caution that "Philosophy" and "Sagacity, must go" to explain the mystery of human existence. Every person must search for their own answers, beyond the confines of the rationality of the church (510).