Emily Dickinson's Use of Loss in Poem 67 and Poem 1036
Many of Emily Dickinson's poems touch on topics dealing with loss. While loss is generally considered a sad or unfortunate thing, Dickinson uses this theme to explain and promote the positive aspects of absence. Throughout many of her poems, one can see clearly that she is an advocate of respecting and accepting the state of being without. Dickinson implies that through these types of losses, one can gain a richer and stronger appreciation for both success and belongings. Poems 67 and 1036 are two that capture the extent of Dickinson's feelings on loss. By understanding and comparing these two works, it is easy to recognize that Dickinson believes that possessing neither material possessions nor the joy of success are the real keys to happiness.
Poem 67 focuses on a battle that could be considered both literal in the sense of a war, or more symbolic as it could act as the anthem for any type of loss or failure. Lines 1 and 2 of the poem explain that success or winning is most valued by those who never prevail. Dickinson is saying that loss creates the strongest appreciation for a win. The lines 3 and 4 state "To comprehend a nectar/ Requires sorest need." This implies that necessity is the only way in which to understand what you want. Next, in the second stanza, Dickinson uses words that denote an actual battle has taken place by saying:
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory.
She is suggesting that winners cannot value their victory. The final stanza emphasizes the fact that the defeated group understands the meaning of victory when she says that "The distant strains of triumph/ Burst agonized and clear!" Dickinson describes the dying soldiers comprehending the meaning of winning the battle in a way that the victors never will. The reason that the winners can't understand the significance of their victory is that they did not taste defeat. The loss of a battle demonstrates to the unsuccessful how far they are from feeling the exuberation of success. Poem 67, as in line with Dickinson's theme of loss, suggests that being in a losing state, at least sometimes, is better than winning all the time. The deflated feeling of being unsuccessful increases the state of appreciation one has for winning.
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
Susan Glaspell’s play, Trifles, was written in 1916, reflects the author’s concern with stereotypical concepts of gender and sex roles of that time period. As the title of the play implies, the concerns of women are often considered to be nothing more than unimportant issues that have little or no value to the true work of society, which is being performed by men. The men who are in charge of investigating the crime are unable to solve the mystery through their supposed superior knowledge. Instead, two women are able decipher evidence that the men overlook because all of the clues are entrenched in household items that are familiar mainly to women during this era. Glaspell expertly uses gender characterization, setting, a great deal of symbolism and both dramatic and verbal irony, to expose social divisions created by strict gender roles, specifically, that women were limited to the household and that their contributions went disregarded and underappreciated.
In this poem, the woman did not just die but she has been dead. She is communicating from beyond the grave, by describing her journey with death. Death is portrayed as a gentleman who takes the speaker on a ride to eternity. Dickinson wrote this poem in a way that the reader is able to feel what the woman is going through. In this poem, death is seen as a passive and not as being something bad. Dickinson’s form and tone enables the reader to have an understanding of the message she is trying to convey. In this poem, each verse paints a piece of a picture for the reader and as you get to the end of the poem the picture is completed.
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.
In Emily Dickinson’s poem “It Was Not Death”, Dickinson is stuck in a mental state of hopelessness and despair which she cannot define nor understand. As Dickinson does not know the cause of her anguish, she begins the poem by referring to her condition with an unidentified “it”, and throughout the poem she is trying to make sense of this “it”. The poem is written in ballad meter as it consists of four line stanzas that contain alternate lines of iambic tetrameter followed by iambic trimeter.
In Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles Mr. Wright’s murder is never solved because the two women in the story unite against of the arrogance of men to hide evidence that would prove Mrs. Wright as the murderer. The play Trifles is about the death of farmer Mr. Wright and how the town sheriff and attorney try to find evidence that his wife Mrs. Wright killed him. As the play progresses the men’s wives who had come along were discovering important pieces of evidence that prove the men’s theory but chose to hide from them to illustrate the point that their ideas should have been valued and not something to be trifled. The very irony of the play comes from its title trifles and is defined as something that isn’t very important or has no relevance to the situation that it is presented to. In this play the irony of the title comes from the fact that the men find the women’s opinions on the case trifling even though the women solve the crime which ends up being the downfall of the men as they would have been able to prosecute Mrs. Wright if they had listened which made the women’s opinions not trifling. Glaspell was born in an age where women were still considered the property of men and they had no real value in society in the eyes of men except for procreation and motherhood. This attitude towards women was what inspired Glaspell to write the play Trifles and to illustrate the point that women’s attitudes should be just as valued as men’s and to let women have a sense of fulfillment in life and break the shackles that were holding them only as obedient housewives. Trifles was also inspired by a real murder trial that Glaspell had been covering when she was a reporter in the year 1900. Glaspell is a major symbol of the feminist movement of l...
states that the one who has died for his country is the one who really values the win. In “VIII”, it is stated that “mirth is the mail of anguish” which appears to contradictory. However, in Dickinson’s poem, it is used as an ironic statement to prove that people go to extreme lengths to hide their pain. Along with irony, both poems contain a paradox. In “I”, it is “success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.” In “VIII” it is “the ecstacy of death.” Both poems also repeat the same idea in a number of ways.
Emily Dickinson in her poem anthology had many, varied attitudes towards many questions about both life and death. She expressed these in a great variety of tones throughout each of her poems and the speaker in these individual poems is often hard for the reader to identify. In many of her poems, she preferred to conceal the specific causes and nature of her deepest feelings, especially experiences of suffering, and her subjects flow so much into one another in language and conception that it is often difficult to tell if she is writing about people or God, nature or society, spirit or art. Dickinson was a very diverse poet, constantly having hidden meanings and different poetic schemes in her poems, she was all over the place. In many
Gender discrimination is defined as prejudice against an individual due to his or her gender or sex. Discrimination against women has been occurring for years and continues to pose an issue today, especially in institutions such as the workforce. In the past, women were limited to very few rights; they were not permitted to vote and were considered as “property”. The only real jobs they had were housewives.and only a handful of women were in the labor force. In today’s society, women compose more than half of the workforce, yet they earn a significantly less amount compared to their male counterparts for completing the same tasks. Due to the subtleness of the issue, many still continue to be unaware of the discrimination which occurs. Though the issues regarding gender discrimination have gone through improvements recently, the issue at hand
Susan Glaspell in Trifles explores the repression of women. Since the beginning of time, women have been looked down upon by men. They have been considered “dumb” and even a form of property. Being physically and emotionally abused by men, women in the early 1900’s struggled to break the mold formed by society.
Death is an extremely common recurring theme in poetry itself, let alone the conceptions of Emily Dickinson, whose take on death varies from poem to poem. Her view on the subject was common for puritans of the time though, as she interpreted the way in which someone died to signify the current state of his or her soul, a peaceful death meaning harmony with God, whereas a violent or agitated death would infer the opposite. She as an author often personified death under many different appearances, some polite and good, others inherently evil in appearance.
Susan Glaspell's play, "Trifles", attempts to define one of the main behavioral differences between man and woman. For most of the story, the two genders are not only geographically separated, but also separated in thought processes and motive, so that the reader might readily make comparisons between the two genders. Glaspell not only verbally acknowledges this behavioral difference in the play, but also demonstrates it through the characters' actions and the turns of the plot. The timid and overlooked women who appear in the beginning of the play eventually become the delicate detectives who, discounted by the men, discover all of the clues that display a female to be the disillusioned murderer of her (not so dearly) departed husband. Meanwhile, the men in the play not only arrogantly overlook the "trifling" clues that the women find that point to the murderer, but also underestimate the murderer herself. "These were trifles to the men but in reality they told the story and only the women could see that (Erin Williams)". The women seem to be the insightful unsung heroes while the men remain outwardly in charge, but sadly ignorant.
Emily Dickinson describes an unusual and meaningful trip with “Death”. The poem was written around 1863, originally, the poem was not titled. When it was published, Thomas Johnson named it depending on the meaning of the poem. Dickinson did not fond of gaining reputation and money-she even tried to avoid those. She focused on artist creation, for instance writing poems. Therefore, she achieved the extreme high levels in writing. Her poems are vacant and inspiring. She had a deep thinking about the connection of death and immortality in this poem. I am going to analyze the poem on its forms and depths to let the readers understand the poem
...d women’s biological purpose has provided men a source of comparative advantage in work. It is, therefore, natural for most companies to think that women cannot be as capable as men in terms of assuming strenuous or challenging positions because women, by default, become less participative and more vulnerable when they start to have family and children. Apparently, this situation has led to various gender discriminations in the labor market.
Death is something no one bears the power to control. Emily Dickinson does an extraordinary job at presenting death in many of her poems. Dickinson uses death as the central theme for many of her poems. Living next to the cemetery from a young age, it had a great influence on Dickinson and her incorporation of death and immortality in her poems. Emily Dickinson talks about death and the meaning of death in many of the poems give her readers an understanding of how darkness can be viewed. It is strange for a writer to talk about death as much as she does, however, it is presented very smoothly in her poems. Talking so much about death, it seemed, as Dickinson was obsessed with the idea of an afterlife. The loss of a very close friend, Samuel