One of the most common things in Emily Dickinson's poetry is that she does not title her poems.  The first line of the poem is the title.  In her poems she often leaves out helping verbs and connecting words.  She also doesn't use much punctuation. She did not worry about using sentence structure of grammar in her poetry.

One reason people think her poems are so mysterious is because of her seclusion from the world.  She lived alone and sheltered herself from the world, which can cause a person to create different meanings for words and symbols.  Even thought she lived during the civil war, none of her poems pertained to it.

All her poems have to do with love, nature, religion and death. She talks about inner struggle and personal problems.  For example in the poem, “I Felt a Funeral on my Brain.” She talks about a person’s decent into madness. They feel like they are dying inside, that’s why she talks about a funeral because the two are so closely related.

Emily Dickinson talks about death in her poems because she has a strong belief that a way a person dies indicates the state of the person’s soul.  So if someone dies peacefully they will have a peaceful life with god.  For example in the poem, “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I died,” talks about how someone died so peacefully that the only noise heard was a fly buzzing around the room.  She creates the image of a peacefully and painless death.

Emily Dickinson often wrote about love and when she did openness and honor.  For example in the poem, “I Cannot Live with You,” she is talking about the intensity of her love and is her depression at having to live away from each other.  This is one her most famous love poems and it had a very deep meaning.

Emily Dickinson was very involved with man’s relationship to God. In her poems she discusses God’s kindness and his cruelness.  For example in the poem, “He Fumbles at your Spirit,” she talks about how God has the power over anyone and he controls what happens to people.  I think in this poem she is trying to show god in a cruel way because of how he just messes with people’s spirits.

Emily Dickinson also talks about nature in a lot of her poems. She wrote about nature because it talks about beauty and joy.  For example in the poem, “In a Bird Came Down,” she talks about the beauty of a bird when they think no one is watching.  Then when the bird realizes that there is someone watching it is startled and flies away, but it still does it gracefully.