In Dickinson’s poem, she used the speaker to connect to the toll of performance on the self and the mind as seen through the perceptive presented in Sandra Runzo’s paper. Just as she uses in many of her poems, in her poem, “I FELT a Cleaving in my Mind,” Dickinson uses images of the mind and self to connect to the disconnection Dickinson may have felt in her own life. Another aspect of the poem is the performance to maintain this appearance of a “woman” and slowly losing a part of one’s self and mind the more time a person puts on a performance that is not of their true selves. Runzo discusses in “Dickinson’s Transgressive Body” that Dickinson, “in imitation of the body’s transcendence of culturally imposed limits, spaces of confinement permute …show more content…
This poem speaks to the fear of slowly losing one’s self and mind because just like the persona, they are helpless to stop it, just like the “Balls—upon a Floor” (8). The speaker appears afraid of losing himself or herself completely, but cannot stop the process once the “balls” start to roll. Runzo wrote, “Dickinson repudiates these ‘normalizing’ cultural definitions of her life; through her invocations of law and convention, Dickinson disconnects herself from cultural conceptions of “woman” in Victorian America” (Runzo 5). Runzo noted in her article, Dickinson has a disconnection from the culturally defined ideas of being a woman, and in this poem, the speaker certainly tries to be a part of the society that tries to define them, but also suffers from the same disconnection as Runzo describes about Emily Dickinson. The lines, “The thought behind, I strove to join / Unto the thought before--/ But Sequence raveled out of Sound” suggests that the speaker, at least, has tried to be a part of the society around them (5-7). The poem also shows that the performance of being someone the speaker is not has taken a toll on the speaker such as in the choice of the words of “raveled out” and the break after the word, “before,” as if to show the speaker’s attempt at performing is halted, and then the “But” shows her failure in her performance. Not only does Dickinson recognize the dangers of such performance, she uses her poem to demonstrate that the performance itself of being a woman does not guarantee the acceptance of being a “woman” in Victorian America. Dickinson’s “I FELT a Cleaving in my Mind” presents readers with the conception of the cost of performing in our society and the losing of one’s self and mind through this performance. While this poem was written over a hundred years ago, this poem offers a perspective on how the performance of one’s
The readers are apt to feel confused in the contrasting ways the woman in this poem has been depicted. The lady described in the poem leads to contrasting lives during the day and night. She is a normal girl in her Cadillac in the day while in her pink Mustang she is a prostitute driving on highways in the night. In the poem the imagery of body recurs frequently as “moving in the dust” and “every time she is touched”. The reference to woman’s body could possibly be the metaphor for the derogatory ways women’s labor, especially the physical labor is represented. The contrast between day and night possibly highlights the two contrasting ways the women are represented in society.
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.
Phillips, Elizabeth. "The Histrionic Imagination." Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance. University Park and London: Penn State, 1919. 85-87. Print.
only this, but Dickinson illustrates poetic skill in the unity of the poem. She makes her
Feit Diehl, Joanne. “’Ransom in a Voice’: Language as Defense in Dickinson’s Poetry.” Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 156-75.
In Emily Dickinson’s dramatic monolog “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” a journey of a spiritual awakening is expressed. Dickinson writes about how a child of God is found then goes out to find other lost souls. Literary Critic Gregory Palmerino indicates “‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’ maybe Dickinson’s most expansive poem if not her magnum opus, yet I do believe there is a discernible meaning – a center – to be found there. That center is her struggle with God” (84). Dickinson develops her poem using sound, symbolism, and figurative language.
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.
One of Emily Dickinson’s greatest skills is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In this sense, she reshapes how her readers view her subjects and the meaning that they have in the world. She also has the ability to assign a word to abstractness, making her poems seemingly vague and unclear on the surface. Her poems are so carefully crafted that each word can be dissected and the reader is able to uncover intense meanings and images. Often focusing on more gothic themes, Dickinson shows an appreciation for the natural world in a handful of poems. Although Dickinson’s poem #1489 seems disoriented, it produces a parallelism of experience between the speaker and the audience that encompasses the abstractness and unexpectedness of an event.
The waxing and waning action of the text might symbolize the constant cycles of life. The fact that the text recedes then elongates in rhythm make the reader think the speaker of the poem is not sure what steps to take in their life. The speaker might not have convinced him or herself about the suicide attempt. Many suicidal thoughts are stopped short of action and then thought about later. Dickinson writes in this style to show the opposing forces of every situation. Suicide would likely be the most contemplated decision the narrator has ever had to make.
A recurring theme in Emily Dickinson’s poetry was death. Many years of Emily Dickinson’s adult years consisted of man...
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
“Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry.” Emily Dickinson Museum. Trustees of Amherst College, 2009. Web. 23 January 2014.
Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of short poems in her lifetime. Having read only a very small percentage of her work, it’s clear to me the recognized genius of this woman is well deserved, and that I have more to learn from her. Dickinson’s poetry touches of life, death, nature, religion, sexuality, identity, gender roles, and that’s just the surface.
Emily Dickinson was a nineteenth – century American writer whose poems changed the way people perceive poetry. She is one of the most mysterious writers of all times. Her personal life and her works are still the cause of debates and are not fully solved. Her poems are dedicated to life and finding the real truth. Her two poems: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” and “Much madness is divinest sense” represent Dickinson’s quest to reveal the mystery and truth of life. In order to fully understand Dickinson’s poems, one must learn about her personal and historical event such as “The Second Great Awakening” and “The United States women’s suffrage movement “surrounding her life that contributed to the creation of her works.
These lines express Dickinson’s thoughts about the restrictions of her life in her society. The fact that her life was ‘shaven’ seems to give the image of being cut down to size with a razor to fit her frame, and this is a very sharp image. It also seems to hold connotations to the times of torture and the methods they used, and she may be suggesting that the rest of society make her life torture. It is as if her whole life has been shaped and trapped, which is not by its own nature, and from which it can not escape.