Indeterminacy, Freedom and an Acknowledgement of the Bronte Sisters in Emily Dickinson’s “All Overgrown by Cunning Moss”

Abstract

The purpose of this analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “All overgrown by cunning moss” (1859), within the context of the author’s influences (namely, Charlotte Bronte), is to explore how the poem challenges notions of reality and classification and uses nature and death as a way to represent indeterminacy as a state of being. In doing so, the poem functions not only as representation of natural phenomena, but also as an illustration of poetics, that is, how poetic discourse creates a methodology for understanding alternative states of being, which then amplify the individual reader’s ability to detect and discern multiple ways of seeing, and multiple interpretative possibilities.