Beauty, truth and death

"I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
  
"He questioned softly why I failed?         
'For beauty,' I replied.
'And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,' he said.
  
"And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,         
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names."

I died for beauty, but was scarce. Emily Dickinson

She is one of my favourite poets. She knew beauty and nature - she was fascinated by death.

She could communicate well with other people, as long as it was done in writing. Emily Dickinson spent long years in her room, with very little human contact, talking to others through a closed door and writing hundreds of poems.

Dickinson is one of my favourite poets because she was a loner and a dreamer, who refused to integrate and didn't seem to be afraid to do things her own way.

Her poems populated my mind as a child. 'I died of beauty, but was scarce' was her first piece I read, aged 10. I stole one of my father's American poetry books, which ended up living by my bedside for years, alongside some of his Shakespeare books, both in English and Portuguese, and an archaic English dictionary, of course.

If anyone is not convinced by my words, my mother can confirm I was a very strange child. I spent most of my spare time playing alone, but mostly reading anything I could find.

I was a dreamer too. By the time I discovered Dickinson, I had already frightened my little impressionable self with Poe, cried with Shakespeare's sonnets and been utterly delighted by Whitman's patriotic optimism.

However Dickinson made me aware of life and death. She fascinated me with the simple structure of her poems and undeniable strength of her verses.

She taught an already melancholic child to accept the ephemeral nature of the human being. I had never thought so intensely about my own existence as I did after reading her poems. I already knew people died, but she made me aware of my own mortality.

I researched her life a few years later and never ceased to be fascinated. The fact that she lived as a recluse and dedicated her entire life to writing sparked admiration and sadness at the same time.

I could not understand, as a teenager, why someone would choose loneliness. I understand now and admire her even more.

She made a choice and what she created, I believe greatly influenced by that choice, was beautiful. Some would argue she had an unhappy, unfulfilled life which she perhaps regretted when the end finally came. If so, then she did die for beauty.

Emily Dickinson died aged 55 and was laid in a coffin lined with vanilla-scented heliotrope, Lady's Slipper orchid and a "knot of blue field violets".

Before she died, she made the poignant request to have her coffin carried, not driven, through fields of buttercups to the family plot at the local cemetery.

As I was growing up, she taught me it was fine to be who you are. I have forgotten that lesson many times along the way. I've remembered it again.