Nasim Zahedi Doost - MA of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Postgraduate Department of English Language and Literature, Boroujerd, Islamic Azad University, Boroujerd Branch, Iran
Leila Baradaran Jamili - Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Postgraduate Department of English Language and Literature, Boroujerd, Islamic Azad University, Boroujerd Branch, Iran

The present paper studies the ultimate truth and reality behind the various pictures of death in Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s (1830-1886) The Complete Poems (1955) especially three of its most eminent poems, I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, Because I Could not Stop for Death, and The Last Night She Lived. Since Dickinson uses different terms for death, and she repeats the term more than four hundred times in her poems, the image of death can be a noteworthy feature in, and a proper touchstone for her poetry. The study goes beyond the meaning of death in her poems and finds its different meanings as well. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustave Jung’s ideas about death, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s viewpoint on spirit, death, and morality are used practically in order to elucidate dissimilar gist of the death in these poems. Through interpreting, philosophizing and analyzing her poems of death, the paper indicates that death is a kind of mask which covers life in Dickinson’s poetry. Indeed, wherever the word death is used, the unceasing, everlasting life behind it metamorphoses the earthly meaning of death or its ultimate reality into a heavenly gate of eternity or ultimate truth.

Death, Pictures of Death, Ultimate Truth, Ultimate Reality, Eternity, Morality