Eye can’t see
Have you ever been blinded before? If not, I haven’t either! Emily Dickinson lost her eyesight at an old age due to eye restrains by writing poems during dark nights. Despite her disability, she wrote two poems describing her blindness. In the poems, she talked about sight and darkness, but what is she really trying to say about it on a metaphorical level? In both poems, Dickinson is comparing sight to a life full of order and happiness. A life of dreams and goals. By losing “sight”, your life changed and turned for the worse.Darkness can be seen as the unpleasant things of life.
In the first poem,”We Grow Accustomed To The Dark” we can see the idea of sight and darkness as a metaphor presenting.In stanza 2, the speaker said,”A moment-We uncertain step/For newness of the night/Then fit our vision to the Dark/And meet the Road-erect”.What this means is that when you first lose your direction in life, you are uncertain of what to do, but eventually you will learn and grow accustom to the darkness in life. You will need to keep trying and eventually you will step in the right direction and you
The book Blind, written by Rachel DeWoskin, is about a highschool sophomore named Emma, who went blind after being struck in the face with a firework. When she first lost her sight, Emma was placed in a hospital for over 2 months, and once she was released, she could finally go home again. DeWoskin uses the characterization of Emma throughout the beginning of the text to help the reader understand the character’s struggle more. Especially in the first few chapters, it was difficult for Emma to adapt to a world without sight. For instance, DeWoskin writes, “And sat down, numb, on our gold couch. And tried to open my eyes, rocked, counted my legs and arms and fingers. I didn’t cry. Or talk” (DeWoskin 44). As a result of losing a very important scent, she’s started to act differently from a person with sight.
To understand a poem you have to know the setting, the poem’s persona, the tone, the kind of situation that is occurring throughout the poem, and you have to know the clear message of the poem, if there is one. In “Traveling Through the Dark” these five key details are presented to the readers. The poem’s persona is the narrator himself. The narrator is
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see,” quote by Henry David Thoreau. Icarus is a mythical story about how a father, Daedalus, and his son, Icarus, created a pair of wings for both to fly in the horizon. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high for the wax will melt and not too low for the sea will dampen his wings. Of course, Icarus’s stubbornness caused him to fly too high and the wax to melt. He fell to his death into the ocean and drowned. The way we perceive our surroundings may differ from others around us. Some may have a different perspective, others may have the same, it all depends in how one may view it.
The life led by Emily Dickinson was one secluded from the outside world, but full of color and light within. During her time she was not well known, but as time progressed after her death more and more people took her works into consideration and many of them were published. Dickinson’s life was interesting in its self, but the life her poems held, changed American Literature. Emily Dickinson led a unique life that emotionally attached her to her writing and the people who would read them long after she died.
In the first poem “We Grow Accustomed To The Dark” the poet is talking about depression and happiness. This shows depression to happiness by its saying when you have times of sadness you can overcome it and become happy. The poet is talking about depression to happiness in this lines “We uncertain step for newness of the night then fit our vision to the dark and meet the road erect”. Another quote from poem that supports my claim is “Either the darkness alters or something in the sight adjust myself to midnight and life steps almost straight”. This is saying once you stop being depression and live life to the fullest it’s easier to be happy person.
In the first stanza, the narrator says, that “I got my eye put out” (1), showing that she can now only see from one eye because of the singular use of eyes. Because she only talks of having lost sight in one eye, it can be assumed that she laments the limited vision that is now provided by her remaining eye. The narrator’s fragmented and limited vision caused b...
The first poem I will discuss is from the first portion of the book and as I analyze the piece, it is easy to see the distinction between the tone of the two poems. “The Eye” begins by saying: “Bad Grandfather wouldn’t feed us. He turned the lights out when we tried to read”(19).
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10th, 1830. She grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. When she was middle age, she didn’t come out of her house very often; she didn’t even attend her father’s funeral. It was said to be that she was depressed, she had epilepsy, agoraphobia, or social anxiety. She only communicated with her family through letters. In 1884 she fell ill due to kidney failure. Sight is what is produced from your eyes, and what is to vision means to see with your heart. In Before I got my eye put out and We Grow Accustomed to the Dark both have an underlying meaning. Some may perceive it to be literal, and some may see it to be something deeper. These poems both have a deeper meaning, she could have had an accident, lost her vision, and her sight to appreciate being able to see would be a bit understated. Some don’t appreciate what we have until they’ve lost it.
In literature, blindness serves a general significant meaning of the absence of knowledge and insight. In life, physical blindness usually represents an inability or handicap, and those people afflicted with it are pitied. The act of being blind can set limitations on the human mind, thus causing their perception of reality to dramatically change in ways that can cause fear, personal insecurities, and eternal isolation. However, “Cathedral” utilizes blindness as an opportunity to expand outside those limits and exceed boundaries that can produce a compelling, internal change within an individual’s life. Those who have the ability of sight are able to examine and interpret their surroundings differently than those who are physically unable to see. Carver suggests an idea that sight and blindness offer two different perceptions of reality that can challenge and ultimately teach an individual to appreciate the powerful significance of truly seeing without seeing. Therefore, Raymond Carver passionately emphasizes a message that introduces blindness as not a setback, but a valuable gift that can offer a lesson of appreciation and acceptance toward viewing the world in a more open-minded perspective.
Emily Dickinson lived in an era of Naturalism and Realism (1855-1910). She lived in a period of The Civil War and the Frontier. She was affected by her life and the era she lived in. She also had many deaths in her family and that’s part of the reason that she was very morbid and wrote about death.
Breaking news revealing the truth about Emily Dickinson’s life has recently been uncovered. For the past hundred-plus years literary historians believed Dickinson to be a plain and quiet type of person who did not communicate with the public for most of her life. Her romanticism poetry drew attention from fellow literary legends. After corresponding with the well-known Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who showed interest in her work but advised her not to publish it, she became defiant to publish any of her work.
There are a few themes that are presented throughout Emily’s poems, one of themes was nature. Many poets during Dickinson time wrote about nature, but Dickinson looked at nature differently than they did, and wrote about it in a different way then they did. In a lot of her poems she writes about the mystery of nature and its qualities, while also marveling at it. Emily spent much of her time studying nature and the various aspects of it. One example of a poem where she talks about nature is “A bird came down the walk.” In this poem the bird is moving around and is in action. This bird is also oblivious to a person watching it. Emily’s point in writing this poem is to say that as the person is not seen then nature keeps moving along in its random and informal way (Borus: 44-73).
“What am I afraid of?” Everyone has asked themselves this or something similar to this at some point in their life. It then seems suiting that Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this, but her responses differ from many. In this poem, she takes a casual and personal tone by talking to the reader, helping to relate this poem to anyone. In the first stanza, she says “Afraid! Of whom am I afraid?” (1), almost as if what follows will be an explanation of what she fears the most. Instead, she lists what she does not fear. Her points mainly focus on Death, Life, and Resurrection which are points that people fear in different circumstances. Her tone implies to the reader that she sees no reason to fear any of these things.
Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Success is counted sweetest” ironically explains a part of human nature through establishing a paradox. The paradox presented states that success becomes more tangible and easier to appreciate the further one is from it. The poem creates a complicated metaphor that extends throughout the poem to guide the reader through the process of understanding this idea. The specific implementations of rhyme employed by the poem help connect lines of parallel meaning within this metaphor to allow the reader to fully comprehend such a dynamic claim. Similarly, the poem benefits from the use of various sound devices which establish a tone that is essential to the overall understanding of how the level of appreciation and comprehension of success directly relates to how distant one’s self is from success.
Psychological criticism is known as the type of criticism that analyses the writer’s work within the realms of Freud’s psychological theories. Such approach can be used when trying to reconstruct an author’s position throughout their literary writings, as well as understanding whom the author was and how their mind created such works. When considering the work of Emily Dickinson, psychoanalytic criticism comes into play with the role of explaining the many meanings behind her poetry, as to make the reader relate to such poetry on a deeper level or not to who she was as a human being.