"My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close" - poem and thoughts on.

Emily Dickinson
“My life closed twice before its close”

My life closed twice before its close
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell

Thoughts on
“My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close”
Emily Dickinson

This is one of the best poems that I have ever read. One of the reasons is because Emily Dickinson in “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close” shows the problem of dying in a way that I can understand it clearly. She gives us the picture of the life of a person who has lost someone and was touched by the death of people very close to her.
There are many ways to interpret this poem. The one, which I like the most, is that Emily Dickinson is talking about herself. That she has lost two people whom she loved very much. She cannot forget this and remembers her old life. Everything reminds her about death. Her life is full of misery and she is afraid that she will die soon. Her soul “died” with the people that she loved. She worries that nothing about her would remain after the end of her life and the existence of her body.
Her sorrow is great and hard to forget. Her life is as sad as the death she ponders. Near the end of her life she remembers only a few happy moments; almost every moment in her life was worthless and not important. The last two lines:
“Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell”
are examples of this feeling and are my favourite part of this poem. Maybe, because I disagree with them, or maybe, because sometimes I must agree. I don’t think that all human life is sad, but when I hear about all the miseries such as children that don’t have anything to eat or about people who were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I think that Emily Dickinson was right when she said that we know everything that we need to know about hell. We know things that are so awful. It is impossible to imagine that in a different place there exist wars and cruel death, but in the world that is around us we must live and be happy.
Another way in which I interpret this poem is that “closing life” does not represent death but is the symbol of lost love. For many people love is everything, especially when they are young and believe in the strength and the power of love. Maybe the same happened to Emily Dickinson. Maybe she had fallen in love and believed that her love was immortal and that it would last forever, then she lost it. Her hope and her future that she trusted disappeared, and this was the first close of her life. She could not trust people anymore, and perhaps she met another love and had another disappointment. This may have showed her that life doesn’t have a true sense that it is just an existence after which is unavoidable death. Only fortune can decide if our life is to be happy, or one big defeat. Again lines about heaven and hell can be interpreted as words that talk about our lives on earth -- are they similar to heaven or hell.
I really like this poem, because it has many ways of interpretation, because it’s written by my favourite author, because it shows the human soul, because it does not ask us to act in a different way and because it shows the feelings of the author in a very emotional way.