So the abandon of this celebrated Dickinson love poem is not out of place and can be read for what it is: a passionate, exuberant and loving cry from the heart. The poem has the trademark up-note ending, so that the reader must guess where the breakdown leads to — the heaven of well-being, or the hell of continued mental anguish.
There is a theory that Dickinson, like her nephew Ned, was epileptic; she definitely suffered eye trouble and, as we know, she had agoraphobic tendencies.
Any of these, or just plain old depression, might have sparked this poem. Who are you? The narrator may be nobody but she makes herself somebody with that capital N. Here is another poem about notoriety and the public eye.
This is one that appealed hugely to me as a child for its cheekiness and for that unexpected frog. This is my favourite Emily Dickinson poem. Its warmth and positivity speak to my gut every time. Was she qualifying hope in some private way? This is a poem I studied at school at about the age of ten.
Dickinson valued the musicality of words and she loved a hymnal beat. Read this one to your young friends. This may be tied in with the notion that because Dickinson was reclusive, she was also angsty and nun-like. It may also be linked to a general fascination with those who beat their own path, particularly if they seem to do it alone.
The grim reaper in this poem is a civil gentleman who takes the narrator — already ghostlike in gossamer and tulle — gently towards death. The poem is cryptic — it may be about the afterlife, or it may be about an actual lover; it may be a meditation on anger, helplessness and power.
Controlled, alert, expectant, aware of the perpetual compromise between clay and spirit, she accepted the inscrutable truths of life in a fashion which reveals how humor and pathos contend in her. It is this which gives her style those sudden turns and that startling imagery.
Humor is not, perhaps, a characteristic associated with pure lyric poetry, and yet Emily Dickinson's transcendental humor is one of the deep sources of her supremacy. Both in thought and in expression she gains her piercing quality, her undeniable spiritual thrust, by this gift, stimulating, mystifying, but forever inspiring her readers to a profound conception of high destinies.
The most apparent instances of this keen, shrewd delight in challenging convention, in the effort to establish, through contrast, reconcilement of the earthly and the eternal, are to be found in her imagery. Although her similes and metaphors may be devoid of languid aesthetic elegance, they are quivering to express living ideas, and so they come surprisingly close to what we are fond of calling the commonplace. She reverses the usual, she hitches her star to a wagon, transfixing homely daily phrases for poetic purposes.
Such an audacity has seldom invaded poetry with a desire to tell immortal truths through the medium of a deep sentiment for old habitual things.
It is true that we permit this liberty to the greatest poets, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, and some others; but in America our poets have been sharply charged not to offend in this respect. Here tradition still animates many critics in the belief that real poetry must have exalted phraseology. Even more homely is the domestic suggestion wherewith the poet sets forth an eternally, profoundly significant fact:—. The trying on the utmost, The morning it is new, Is terribler than wearing it A whole existence through.
Surely such a commonplace comparison gives startling vividness to the innate idea. Many are the poetic uses she makes of practical everyday life:—.
Such dimity convictions, A horror so refined, Of freckled human nature, Of Deity ashamed;. More significantly, however, than in these epithets and figures, irony and paradox appear in those analyses of truth where she reveals the deep note of tragic idealism:—. Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory, As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear;.
Essential oils are wrung The atter from the rose Is not expressed by suns alone, It is the gift of screws. She took delight in piquing the curiosity, and often her love of mysterious challenging symbolism led her to the borderland of obscurity. No other of her poems has, perhaps, such a union of playfulness and of terrible comment upon the thwarted aspirations of a suffering soul as has this:—.
I asked no other thing, No other was denied. I offered Being for it; The mighty merchant smiled. He twirled a button, Without a glance my way: 'But, madam, is there nothing else That we can show to-day? Since life seemed, to her, seldom to move along wholly simple and direct ways, she delighted to accentuate the fact that out of apparent contradictions and discords are wrought the subtlest harmonies:—.
Sufficient truth that we shall rise— Deposed, at length, the grave— To that new marriage, justified Through Calvaries of Love;. The lightning that preceded it Struck no one but myself, But I would not exchange the bolt For all the rest of life. The expectation of finding in her work some quick, perverse, illuminating comment upon eternal truths certainly keeps a reader's interest from flagging, but passionate intensity and fine irony do not fully explain Emily Dickinson 's significance.
There is a third characteristic trait, a dauntless courage in accepting life. Existence, to her, was a momentous experience, and she let no promises of a future life deter her from feeling the throbs of this one. No false comfort released her from dismay at present anguish. An energy of pain and joy swept her soul, but did not leave any residue of bitterness or of sharp innuendo against the ways of the Almighty.
Grief was a faith, not a disaster. She made no effort to smother the recollections of old companionship by that species of spiritual death to which so many people consent. Her creed was expressed in these stanzas:—. They say that 'time assuages,'— Time never did assuage; An actual suffering strengthens, As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble, But not a remedy. If such it prove, it proves too There was no malady. The willingness to look with clear directness at the spectacle of life is observable everywhere in her work. The fly diminishes and ironises this commonplace and sentiment-laden moment of death.
It is not what the watchers, the speaker, or the reader expect. While the fly diminishes the lead up to the speaker's death, its appearance also creates a break, coming between 'the light' and the speaker at the very moment of transition: 'And then the Windows failed — and then I could not see to see'.
In the end, the speaker sees the fly and the abyss of oblivion, not the promised salvation or Christ the King. Dickinson uses her trademark dash and carefully placed line breaks to indicate the moment of death, the sudden shift from sight to blindness, light to nothingness. Dickinson has taken the deathbed scene, elsewhere played for melodramatic value such as Little Eva's death in Harriet Beecher Stowe's immensely popular Uncle Tom's Cabin , and used it to consider the reality of death and possibility of annihilation.
Emily Dickinson's poetry is characterised by such moments of sudden shifts, arresting imagery, and carefully considered 'dashing'. Emily Dickinson did not become known as a poet until after her own death. She had asked Lavinia to burn her papers after her death, but when Lavinia discovered the massive number of poems in a drawer, she passed them instead to Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd in fact, the mistress of Dickinson's brother who published three volumes of Dickinson's poetry in the s.
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