Emily Dickinson Diction

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Dickinson uses an extended metaphor in her poem, “A Clock stopped” in order to represent how quickly time goes by and how it has the ultimate power of life or death of a living thing. Through her extensive abstract diction, Dickinson is able to portray an image of a person dying through descriptions of a clock malfunctioning and ultimately not being able to be fixed. The poem begins with “A Clock stopped” (Line 1), which is interpreted as a person has just died. By beginning like this, Dickinson is starting her poem in the middle of an entire situation by not saying the leading events to how this person has come to this ultimate end. Dickinson starts off her metaphor with intense metaphysical diction by using the indefinite article “a” when mentioning the power of the clock for the first time. This inadvertently makes the clock an universal being, forcing the poem to have a greater meaning as a whole relating to all and not just one. …show more content…

“An awe came on the Trinket! The Figures hunched, with pain-- Then quivered out of Decimals--.” These three lines show the last stages of a person’s life in comparison to the parts of a cuckoo clock. The last line, line 9, states, “Into Degreeless noon,” portraying that the person died when noon struck, or when the figurines of the cuckoo clock came out to do their little dance on the hour. Dickinson’s use of diction in this line by describing noon as degreeless, places an image of a clock into the reader’s mind. At noon, the minute and the hour hands are together pointing upwards. This shows how the person’s life has come into contact with their dying moment and he or she will ascend towards heaven at this

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