Immortal Depression

The idea of immortality is usually good...being able to live forever without ever worrying about death again....it's not the worst idea in the world, but it definitely depends on perspective. If you believe in an afterlife that gets considerably better than life here on earth, an immortal afterlife sounds like paradise. If you decide immortality is just an extension of the mortal life you have now, with the afterlife providing nothing new or better, then immortality sounds like eternal misery. Of course, there is always the third option of not believing in any type of afterlife or immortality, which may be the most pessimistic view of all, but that also depends on perspective.

Emily Dickenson writes a poem titled "Because I could not stop for Death", and inside these well-crafted lines lies a very interesting view of immortality and death. It's obvious that Dickenson believes in an immortal afterlife in her first stanza as she writes:

Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

As dark as it may seem, I love this stanza by Dickenson, as it's so expertly written. Death will always come along, and as sure as death is, it doesn't have to hurry to come meet us. We never have time for death. Heck, most people barely plan for it, even though everyone knows it's inevitable. An interesting note here is that Death stops by "kindly", showing a little bit of Dickenson's viewpoint on both life and death. Dickenson believes in an immortal afterlife, and upon further investigation, she doesn't believe in a very optimistic view of the afterlife. In fact, she appears to wish death were permanent instead of having an eternal state of existence.

The major reason I'm exploring Dickenson's view of immortality more than the poem itself is because a current poet, Craig Teicher, writes Dickenson into one of his poems that is titled "Immortality". Teicher also believes Dickenson is dark in her perspective on life, as shown when he writes:

If I could reach my hand out to you now, would you take it? How do you think it would feel? Warm and soft and certain? Or like Emily's: clammy and brittle as hardened paste? Is that not how you imagine her hands? Look again - they were like that, otherwise she could never, would never, have written those poems.

Teicher refers to Dickenson in his poem, but the major connection between these two is the theme of the poem. Both speak of immortality, though Dickenson speaks of immortality going along with death while Teicher simply refers to immortality in abstract terms. The major disconnect between the two is the style. Teicher writes in a more free-writing, paragraph blocked form, while Dickenson writes in a traditional, 4-line stanza form.

If you believe there is an afterlife, which type of afterlife is it? Is it an afterlife that gets better, or is it an afterlife that makes you wish death were permanent? To think that an afterlife could get no better than the life we currently live...to me, that's immortal depression.


Helpful poetry blog of the week: poetryfoundation.org