Albert Einstein once said, “ Be a voice, not an echo.” In other words, are you a “voice”, or a “Somebody”? Or are you an “echo”, a “Nobody”? In the poems, “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson and “Dusting” by Julia Alvarez, both speakers are female. Both narrators of the poems want to be “who they are” or independent. They also want to be unique individuals; however, they approach this goal in different paths. We begin to understand the speaker’s uniqueness as we examine the structure of the poem. In Dickinson’s poem, the speaker is proud to be independent. The text says, “I’m Nobody.” This statement ends with a period as if to say, “I’m independent.” Then she says, “Who are you?” She’s having a conversation with another “Nobody”. …show more content…
The narrator is a young girl, living with her mother, yet she’s old enough to think about leaving home and being who she’s meant to be. The speaker is using “first person, narrative”, and her audience is herself. She’s talking to herself to boost her own confidence in her own individuality. This poem’s structure has no rhyming scheme or organized pattern, which could symbolize her desire to be free from her mother’s need to dictate her daughter’s life. Does freedom to a young girl, anxious to see the world , ever seem frightening? When she writes her name using all capital letters, it shows she has a need to be ‘important’. She writes her name in various ways: ‘script, capitals, scrawled, and scribbled’. This is an analogy for the various aspects of her personality. She will try new things like; travel, and see/experience new cultures. She will further her education by going to college. It says ‘.....She’s practicing signatures like scales’. This indicates her desire to become one of the best of whatever her goals will/might be, reinforcing her need to be an independent
The descriptions and words used create the most vivid images of a mother’s escape to freedom with her son. This poem takes you on both a physical and emotional journey as it unravels through the treacherous demands of freedom. A beautiful example of her ability to rhyme both internally as well as externally can be seen here,
The poem is written in the style of free verse. The poet chooses not to separate the poem into stanzas, but only by punctuation. There is no rhyme scheme or individual rhyme present in the poem. The poems structure creates a personal feel for the reader. The reader can personally experience what the narrator is feeling while she experiences stereotyping.
She gets to the point and proves that in our current world we tend to say more than we should, when just a couple of words can do the same. In her writing, it is evident that the little sentences and words are what make the poem overall that perfect dream she wishes she were part of.
Although the little girl doesn’t listen to the mother the first time she eventually listens in the end. For example, in stanzas 1-4, the little girl asks if she can go to the Freedom March not once, but twice even after her mother had already denied her the first time. These stanzas show how the daughter is a little disobedient at first, but then is able to respect her mother’s wishes. In stanzas 5 and 6, as the little girl is getting ready the mother is happy and smiling because she knows that her little girl is going to be safe, or so she thinks. By these stanzas the reader is able to tell how happy the mother was because she thought her daughter would be safe by listening to her and not going to the March. The last two stanzas, 7 and 8, show that the mother senses something is wrong, she runs to the church to find nothing, but her daughter’s shoe. At this moment she realizes that her baby is gone. These stanzas symbolize that even though her daughter listened to her she still wasn’t safe and is now dead. The Shoe symbolizes the loss the mother is going through and her loss of hope as well. This poem shows how elastic the bond between the daughter and her mother is because the daughter respected her mother’s wish by not going to the March and although the daughter is now dead her mother will always have her in her heart. By her having her
The poem also focuses on what life was like in the sixties. It tells of black freedom marches in the South how they effected one family. It told of how our peace officers reacted to marches with clubs, hoses, guns, and jail. They were fierce and wild and a black child would be no match for them. The mother refused to let her child march in the wild streets of Birmingham and sent her to the safest place that no harm would become of her daughter.
These lines demonstrate the stage of adulthood and the daily challenges that a person is faced with. The allusions in the poem enrich the meaning of the poem and force the reader to become more familiar with all of the meaning hidden behind the words. For example, she uses words such as innocence, imprisonment and captive to capture the feelings experienced in each of the stages. The form of the poem is open because there are no specific instances where the lines are similar. The words in each stanza are divided into each of the three growth stages or personal experiences.
only this, but Dickinson illustrates poetic skill in the unity of the poem. She makes her
Emily Dickinson’s poems, “I” and “VIII”, are both three verses long and convey the irony and anguish of the world in different ways. By paraphrasing each of Dickinson’s poems, “I” and “VIII”, similarities and differences between the two become apparent. Putting the poem into familiar language makes it easier to comprehend.
The poem becomes personal on line 10 when she uses the first person and says “I lost my mother’s watch”. She is letting the reader know what she has lost in reality. Then she gets sidetracked to mention other things she has lost; she then mentions other things she has lost of much more importance such as houses, continents, realms, and cities, but then again mentions it was not so hard to lose those things. But in the end, mention the loss that really matters. She remembers the qualities of the lover she lost.
Much has been said about Emily Dickinson’s mystifying poetry and private life, especially during the years 1860-63. Allegedly it was during these years that the poetess, at the most prolific phase of her career, withdrew from society, began to wear her “characteristic” white dress and suffered a series of psychotic episodes. Dickinson tended to “theatricalize” herself by speaking through a host of personae in her poems and by “fictionalizing” her inner life as a gothic romance (Gilbert 584). Believing that a poem is “the best words in the best order” (to quote S.T. Coleridge) and that all the poems stemming from a single consciousness bring to surface different aspects / manifestations of the same personal mythology, I will firstly disregard biographical details in my interpretation of Dickinson’s poems 378, 341 and 280 and secondly place them in a sort of “continuum” (starting with 378 and ending with 280) to show how they attempt to describe a “plunge” into the Unconscious and a lapse into madness (I refrain from using the term “journey,” for it implies a “telos,” a goal which, whether unattainable or not, is something non-existent in the poems in question). Faced with the problem of articulating and concretizing inner psychological states, Dickinson created a totally new poetic discourse which lacks a transcendental signified and thus can dramatize the three stages of a (narrated) mental collapse: existential despair, withdrawal from the world of the senses and “death” of consciousness.
Dickinson’s over abundant use of the hyphen is to put more voice into, to let the public know it’s her voice, technically being her “signature” as Kamilla Denman states. However, many conclude that the use of the hyphen signifies stress, which is considered to be a “female habit” (Denman). On the other hand, this poem uses the hyphen to enable a certain pause after each line to enhance the depth of her writing or message. In essence with that statement, the hyphen is just “as important as a period” since it does strengthen the psychological themes and moral of this
Once you give into the society, you will not recognize yourself. Emily Dickinson complicates matters more when she writes,” How public – like a Frog – (line 6).” In other words, Dickinson believes she would be exposed and like everybody else as a frog all look and sound the same. Meanwhile, Frost is unsure of him not going with the crowd. In” The Road Not Taken”, Frost chooses between two roads.
Robert Lee Frost and Emily Elizabeth Dickinson portray their individual objectives on their hardships in most of their poems. All through Dickinson’s adult life she never really traveled far from her hometown or far from her home at all. The individuals in her community thought of her as being an eccentric woman. She became known to the people for her fashion dressing in white, and her unwillingness to greet guests (Kirk, P4).
Vendler, Helen. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010. 118-20. Google Books. Google. Web. 5 April. 2014. .
Emily Dickinson’s poem, “When I Gave Myself to Him” demonstrates and examines the commonalities of a women’s role in the 19th century and deliberately moves against the standard. Her use of figurative language, analogies, and the use of dashes represent an intense emotion between her feelings concerning the affiliate desires of society: to marry and have children. Emily uses the conventional use of poetic form by adding six to eight syllables in her quatrain that adds rhyme and musical quality to her poem to treat the unconventional poetic subject of the women’s gender role. This poem is not an ordinary love poem though isolation in unity that deals with the complications and ideas of belonging to someone.