Exploration of the Brain in Emily Dickinson's Poem 670
The brain is one of the most complex organs of the entire human body. How many people over the course of time have explored and tried to explain the brain? Even with millions of peoples' opinions of how the brain works, we still do not understand the most intrinsic parts of it.
The tricky part is the subconscious. We are able to hide things, even from ourselves, for years. How is it that we can bury so much information that becomes so hard to find?
Emily Dickinson understood this concept. She did not understand the way the brain works, perhaps, but without a doubt she did understand that it is able to conceal things from ourselves. "The brain has Corridors-surpassing Material place" (3-4). Surpassing all material things, the brain is past those things.
Within the corridors are heaps of information that we sometimes even become unaware of. Something has to be a trigger, to set off a specific corridor in order to bring that information back to mind. Many times this is proven when a person whom has endured abuse as a child is counseled. Psychiatrists have to probe deep into those corridors to retrieve information that the child has willingly or subconsciously buried.
So, why was Dickinson so interested in these corridors? Perhaps she was dealing with something of her past and during that time realized how hard it is to retrieve things sometimes. Perhaps she was counseling a close friend or family member and wrote this as a result of that. Perhaps she was studying the brain and became interested in doing research. Perhaps none of these things were the case with Dickinson. Whatever her reason, the poem shows much thought.
We go on to read that any ghost meeting at midnight is safer than probing into that abyss called the mind. Why is it so unsafe? Well, what kind of things do we bury deep into our minds? Normally, they are things that we want to forget, painful memories, and embarrassing experiences. Those things can definitely be considered dangerous. If they were not dangerous, why would we bury them in the first place? To illustrate this point, I am going to tell you a story.
I am the child of an alcoholic father. I have always lived under dangerous circumstances, and because of this, I have chosen to forget much of my childhood.
The relationship between mental health and poverty can prove to be complicated at times because of an overwhelmingly large number of outside
The key point to impress is that the list is "carefully selected", which means that a person or group must deliberately decide on those words and phrases, prior to their use. A controlled vocabulary is not an automatic comprehensive set of all things of a given type, but a set of distinctions that are deemed useful.
Saraceno, B.; Ommeren, M.V.; Batniji, R.; Cohen, A.; Gureje, O.; Mahoney, J.; Sridhar, D.; and Underhill, C. (2007). Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low-income and middle-income countries. Global Mental Health Series 5, 370: 1164–74.
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.
Poem 670 is about the inner workings of your mind. The beginning of this poem addresses everyone. She does that by saying, "One need not be a Chamber....One need not be a House." This is saying whether you are small like a chamber or big like a house you will be haunted in your mind. The phenomenon of haunting thoughts, in your brain, exceed anything externally at that moment. Your mind becomes totally focused on the inner dealings that external people or actions are perceived as ghosts. It is literally an internal takeover of your senses. Anything external from there becomes warped and then a part of the haunting in the tunnels or corridors of your mind. We all know this as being scared or getting spooked.
The human sense of sight is a very detailed and complex ability, which humans often take for granted. However, once they take time to think about it, they realize how complicated the process really is. The eye receives light from the outside with the cornea, which then travels through the nerves until the light reaches the brain. The brain processes this light into information about the outside world, and then the brain uses this information to decide how to respond. All this happens in less than half a second.(Robertson, 2012) The used information is then stored inside the brain for safekeeping in memories, though some images may still influence a person’s thoughts. The brain is the central hub for a person, used to give commands and store emotions felt, as well as many other uses. It is the most important organ in the body, and influences what the images sent from the eye are translated into.
...e see a young boy being taught how to use weapons. In “Exposure”, Owen depicts a group of soldiers freezing to death at war, even though they aren’t in the midst of fighting. Lastly, in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” we read about a soldiers who struggles to get his mask on during a gas attack (when the enemy releases a gas deadly upon inhale). Owen describes the soldiers slow death in detail. Not only do these images provide the reader with first hand accounts of war, but they also show Owen’s feelings towards the war. All of these images that are glued into his head will be there forever, which is why he incorporates these realities in his poems, so that everyone can realize that war is nothing more than a inhumane act of terror.
For cognitive scientists and psychologists, the mind is that part of everyone that embodies our memories, thoughts, hopes, desires, beliefs, and experiences. On the other hand, the brain is an organ of the body. It is a collection of chemicals and blood vessels, cells and water th...
Mental health is a broad subject that touches on the psychological, emotional and social well-being of a person and how it affects the way they feel, think or act. Mental health is a fundamental element in the handling of stress, making choices, as well as creating and managing social relationships. Comprehensive understanding of the mental health will be useful in improving healthcare for persons living with mental health problems. According to World Health Organization (WHO), there are about 550 million people globally who live with mental and behavioural disorders which fall under the mental health subject (Kessler, 2010). Scientists and psychologists have realized the possibility of a correlation between poverty and mental health. It is
Wilfred Owen wrote about the distilled pity of war from his first-hand experience. Owen concisely features the carnage and destruction of war in both the poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Strange Meeting’ Owen uses these poems document the psychological and physical debilitation of war. In ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, Owen uses a various amount of literary techniques to visually depict the cruel and grotesque death from the mustard gas whereas ‘Strange Meeting’, portrays the speaker in conversation with a dead soldier that he is presumably responsible for killing, symbolically which emphasises the effect of the wartime trauma. Wilfred Owen’s poetry effectively highlights the carnage and destruction of war to educate the audience on the disillusionment of war.
All exceptional poetry displays a good use of figurative language, imagery, and diction. Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" is a powerful antiwar poem which takes place on a battlefield during World War I. Through dramatic use of imagery, metaphors, and diction, he clearly states his theme that war is terrible and horrific.
In layman’s terms when forming a memory, the brain takes what we see, hear, smell, feel and taste and fills in the blank spaces with information that we have perceived from common knowledge and stores it as a memory. But sometimes something happens that is so shocking that the mind grabs hold of the memory and pushes it underground into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious.
...ways. It can be literal and mean that what has happened can't be fixed - soldiers are dead or the injuries will stay with the wounded forever. It can also mean that the survivors will never forget what they saw. Owen then reminds us that these soldiers are innocent and this war is corrupting them when it shouldn't be and this creates the feeling of injustice.
Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” makes the reader acutely aware of the impact of war. The speaker’s experiences with war are vivid and terrible. Through the themes of the poem, his language choices, and contrasting the pleasant title preceding the disturbing content of the poem, he brings attention to his views on war while during the midst of one himself. Owen uses symbolism in form and language to illustrate the horrors the speaker and his comrades go through; and the way he describes the soldiers, as though they are distorted and damaged, parallels how the speaker’s mind is violated and haunted by war.
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.