The Interpretation Of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

1905 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Emily Dickinson analysis

Emily Dickinson’s poems are giving ample scope for interpretation. At first glance her poems seem simple to interpret because of her brevity but exactly that is what leaves space for phantasy and offers the opportunity for different interpretations. What she really means is therefore vague and difficult to grasp. Through her over usage of dashes, which might dramatize her thoughts, the reader’s power of imagination is induced and he or she is able to accomplish the poem with own ideas. Dashes appear at the end or even within a poem, it could connect both parts, beforehand and afterward, is a caesura, the pause in a line of a verse, or even an ellipsis. Because of all three options it is also difficult to figure out what Dickinson’s intention …show more content…

The first stanza is rhymed abcb and the second defe. Wolosky mentions that Emily Dickinson wrote almost all of her poetry in this hymnal verse form – but almost always for purposes other than those of the church hymn. In this poem, Dickinson used various meters: the common iambic and even hymn meter, it shows that “Dickinson was a consummate metrist” (Cooley 84). For example, verse one, three, five, and seven have the hymnal feet ux ux uux ux, whereas u is the unstressed and x the stressed syllable. The feet of line two and six is an iambic tetrameter (ux ux ux ux) where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed. The fourth and eighth line follow the feet ux ux ux (u), whereas the last unstressed syllable appears only in the fourth and the last verse therefore is a trimeter (Meyer 46). Her usage of dashes and the different meters in this poem furnishes evidence for her reasoning is not finalized or even inscribed and that the lines must proceed. With the help of the reader’s imagination the line of thought can be accomplished in different possible ways. Through these incomplete rhyme schemes and abrupt stress patterns the openness of Emily Dickinson’s poems are supported. Because of the poem’s brevity they seem simple to interpret at first glance but exactly that is what makes it difficult to grasp. Emily Dickinson let it open therefore it could signify

Show More
Related

  • The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinson's Dashes

    1987 Words  | 4 Pages

    The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson: Life and Literature

    1064 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson Poetry Analysis

    769 Words  | 2 Pages

    Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.

    Read More

  • An Interpretation of Emily Dickinson's Poem #315

    921 Words  | 2 Pages

    Emily Dickinson had an interesting life, and is a profound woman in the history of America and literature. Emily wrote many poems. Some are titled, and many are given chronological numbers instead of headlining the main theme. I am interpreting Poem #315.

    Read More

  • A Brief Biography Of Emily Dickinson

    775 Words  | 2 Pages

    The famous well-known poet, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Growing up, she was busy with schooling, religious activities, gardening, baking, and exploring nature. Her family was well known in Massachusetts; her dad was a member of the governor’s cabinet and a US Congressman. In 1840, she attended Amherst Academy. At Amherst Academy, she was an excellent student. Many said she caught much attention and was very original in the way she presented herself. Dickinson’s poetry has a great amount of scientific vocabulary and she gained most of her knowledge about it at this academy. Seven years later, she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. At Mount Holyoke, she was academically successful and was very involved. Like most institutions at the time, Mount Holyoke believed that the students’ religious lives were part of responsibility. Dickinson refused to take part of the school’s Christian evangelical efforts. She had not given up on the claims of Christ, but didn’t think it was an important matter.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson and Her Poetry

    3199 Words  | 7 Pages

    Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson Poems Analysis Essay

    611 Words  | 2 Pages

    Reading a poem by Emily Dickinson can often lead the reader to a rather introspective state. Dickinson writes at length about the drastically transformative effect a book may have upon its’ reader. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Dickinson masterfully uses the ballad meter to tell a story about the ecstasy brought by reading. In poem number 1587, she writes about the changes wrought upon the reader by a book and the liberty literature brings.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson Themes

    1138 Words  | 3 Pages

    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).

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson's Capitalization and Punctuation

    1263 Words  | 3 Pages

    The average reader cannot help but be affected by Dickinson’s style. The capitalized words draw the reader’s attention. They highlight important key words of the poem. The dashes set apart specific words and phrases, forcing the reader to slow down while reading. The dashes compel the reader to contemplate and ponder over the lines. Thus, whether or not Dickinson had a conscious purpose in her unconventional capitalization and punctuation, they have an undeniable effect on the rhythm of the poem and the perception of the reader.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson Analysis

    988 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hopelessness is an intense emotion every person feels at one point in their life, a feeling closely interlinked with depression and suicide. In the poems “It was not Death, for I stood up,” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” by Emily Dickinson and “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the theme of the poems is hopelessness, but the authors approach the theme differently in each poem.

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

    1056 Words  | 3 Pages

    Literary Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American history, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice. Emily Dickinson likes to use many different forms of poetic devices and Emily's use of irony in poems is one of the reasons they stand out in American poetry. In her poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she refers to 'Death' in a good way.

    Read More

  • The Influence Of Personal Experiences In Emily Dickinsons Poetry

    2277 Words  | 5 Pages

    22). Despite her stubborn denials to be labeled, she was very much of a “New

    Read More

  • Personification And Extended Metaphors In Emily Dickinson's Poems

    385 Words  | 1 Pages

    In conclusion the two things that Emily Dickinson uses is personification and extended metaphor. She uses these things in order to make the reader think of the poems deeper

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson: Untitled, Unregulated, and Unchained

    940 Words  | 2 Pages

    Most of Dickinson’s work relies heavily on the musical quality of her verse. One approach to organizing her poems was writing in the structure of the “fourteener”. This meter is the form of nursery rhymes, ballads, and church hymns. Ballads were originally used for storytelling, where the lyrics were set to music. When reading Dickinson’s poetry aloud, one can easily pick up on the rhythmic quality composing the images that tell the story. The provided example of Emily Dickinson’s poetry read aloud has no music, but the animation and gentle cadence of the speaker’s voice provide a melodic undertone for the story.

    Read More

  • Essay On Emily Dickinson

    922 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout Emily Dickinson’s works, an audience can easily see her feministic views as well as her thoughts about democracy that also relate to other well-known authors. Her analytic and important contributions to poetry have brought a lot of controversy in the pass but mainly influences to 20th century American history. Dickinson has logical and at the same time genius ideas. Her well known themes are related to death, nature, success, grief, faith and religion, and the idea of freedom through her poetry. Emily Dickinson is known for the intensity in her works and focused brilliantly on each subject she wrote about.

    Read More

More about The Interpretation Of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Open Document