Emily Dickinson bittersweet poems may seem pre occupied with death and mortality, however their underlying themes are not so much focused on the inevitable fact that everything must come to and end, instead she focuses on defining the differences between living and dying. Each poem establishes the differenc in various ways. Becuase I could not stop for death and I wish I knew that woman's name uses charachters and personification to define the emotional state of the afterlife while On wonderous sea creates identity through presenting foils and commenting on how opposites create a solution and a defintion to themselves. On this wonderous sea is by far the most optimistic as it defines life and death as being a journey and a destination. Despite all the conflicting presentations, Dickinson succesfully presents death in a non traditional light, focusing not on the sorrow of dying, by more on the tragedy of not living.Death's Passenger and the Unamed woman do not live thier lives to their fullest potential and as a result must spend and afterlife full of sorrow and regret however the sailor in On this wonderous sea sees the " Many sails at rest" yet conitnues on his journey to the shore where he happily embraces eternity and passivity.
Yet it is still impossible to deny that life and death go hand and hand. Just as the sailor's destination was the shore, and the passenger destination was the grave. Life and death are inevtiably defined by each other. water is taught by thirst reveals that identity isto some extent created by what you are not. Life and death are opposites, yet they could not exist with out having established the difference between each
other.