Color Denomination By Emily Dickinson Essay

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Emily Dickinson’s poem, Color – Caste – Denomination, is at first encounter difficult to decipher. For students who have not read much poetry or are being introduced to it for the first time, it is necessary to provide a framework before having the students experience the piece. To begin the lesson, I plan to briefly introduce Emily Dickinson by discussing her life and character, and informing the students that this poem was written during the Civil War – Dickinson’s most intense period of productivity as a poet (). Following this, I will handout a sheet that explains the elements of a poem (theme, mood, rhyme, stanza and line) to establish a common language as each begins studying and sharing their thoughts. Then, I will encourage my students, through an online discussion, to attempt to predict the meaning of the poem by first analyzing the title. …show more content…

To investigate the experience of the poem more deeply, I will pose contextual questions as we move through the poem. Questions such as: why do you think Dickinson compares death to sleep in the second stanza? What do you think the line democratic fingers” means? Or, “Chrysalis of Blonde - or Umber – Equal Butterfly”? From there, we will move to questions that encourage deeper thought concerning the meaning of the poem: what profound truth is Dickinson trying to reveal to us?
I will require that each learner provide an analysis of the poem; and through the dissection of each stanza and an analysis of meaning, they will come to comprehend that Dickinson is challenging how the world classifies humans based on race, class and religion. These words, she claims, that we use to identify and separate ourselves are merely delusions that vanish after death (Grimes, 2017):
Color - Caste - Denomination

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