Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote many poems that used a lot of figurative language. Two specific poems, “Before I got my eye put out” and “We grow accustomed to the Dark” both talked about sight in different ways. First, in “Before I got my eye put out”, Dickinson talked about sight in a positive way. She talked about how she wanted to see things before her eyes got put out. Dickinson then changed her tone to defeat as if she gave up on something. From the text, something that can said is that Dickinson isn’t literally talking about her eyesight. She is talking about a loss of something like happiness or peace. For example, the part of the poem when she says, “Before I got my eye put out – I liked as well to see / As other creatures, that have eyes – / And know no other way–...”( 1-4) Here we can see that she is happy and at peace and doesn’t want to lose that. Then, in this part, “The news would strike me dead – / So safer – guess – with just my soul / Opon the window pane / Where other creatures put their eyes – / Incautious – of the Sun –”(17-21) she is saying that she doesn’t want to fight to get the happiness back and plays safely and just goes along with …show more content…
She may mean that sight is knowledge of something. She talks about it as if it’s a time you experience something for the first time. Dickinson tells about how you get hit because the darkness blinds you, but you get back up because you “learn” from your mistakes. For example, in one part of the poem she says, “The Bravest – grope a little – And sometimes hit a Tree Directly in the Forehead – But as they learn to see – Either the Darkness alters – Or something in the sight Adjusts itself to Midnight –”.(13-19) Here this quote shows that when you’re in the dark about something, you can run into a tree, or a problem. But once you get back up from “getting hit”, you can learn to see and find light
In Seeing, Annie Dillard writes about the things people do not see, and the things people choose to see. Dillard does this to make the reader aware of what is around them. People have the attitude of “what you see is what you get.” (Dillard pg. 13) Dillard believes that people do not actually want to see what is really there. That people only want to see what makes them happy. Dillard goes on to discuss all the things we see and do not see, ending by stating “if we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light”. (Dillard Pg.17) Dillard is saying that if you look hard enough there is always something to see.
This work shows a number of things about Dickinson's style of writing. Firstly, it is another example of Dickinson's style of structure, with a loose ABCB rhyme and iambic trimeter. Its theme is of hope which hints at a cry for help signifying further isolation and depression. The poem seems to have an audience of just herself. This could be a poem that she wrote in an attempt to cheer herself up in a time of sadness with an uplifting verse or just a poem written because of how she felt that day; either way it is clear that this poem was not designed for a large audience.
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. This is a quote made by Helen Keller. The two poems, “ We grow accustomed to the Dark” and “Before I got my eye put out”, are both poems that relate back to sight. But Emily Dickinson had two different perspectives in each poem. She has two contrasting attitudes about each poem. In, “We grow accustomed to the Dark”, Dickinson’s attitude is more positive, but in, “Before I got my eye put out”, her attitude is more negative.
Dickinson's poetry is both thought provoking and shocking. This poem communicates many things about Dickinson, such as her cynical outlook on God, and her obsession with death. It is puzzling to me why a young lady such as Emily Dickinson would be so melancholy, since she seemed to have such a good life. Perhaps she just revealed in her poetry that dark side that most people try to keep hidden.
Dickinson spent a majority of her life living in solitude in Amherst, to which the majority saw as insane. The first stanza of the poem: “Much Madness is divinest sense,” expands on the idea of sense by stating that insanity is sense, stating
Thus, before we can have an understanding of the human condition, we must endure a journey to wisdom. The two authors view the journey to wisdom in terms of metaphors of blindness and seeing. Sight is a frequently used metaphor for perception, knowledge and awareness, whilst blindness connotes ignorance, insensitivity and the inability to perceive and understand. In the two plays, the characters are initially blind to their own condition, which eventually leads them to make faulty decisions, despite the warnings of others. Consequently the characters suffer as a result of their poor judgment, and only then do they gain sight and a clear understanding of their own situation.
...eart would split, but because she is able to see nature through her imagination she is safe from those effects, shown when she says, “So safer-guess-with just my soul” (18) While Emerson uses only sight to form a connection with nature, Dickinson uses both sight and imagination to connect people’s souls to nature when she says, “…with just my soul open the window pane”(19); the eyes are said to be the windows that lead to one’s soul, so through this statement Dickinson shows that there is a correlation between imagination, sight, and soul because through all of them one is able to become one with nature. Through the very act of writing this poem Dickinson reveals that poetic writing is another form of reaching oneness with nature.
"I’ve Seen a Dying Eye," by Emily Dickinson, is a poem about the nature of death. A sense of uncertainty and uncontrollability about death seems to exist. The observer’s speech seems hesitant and unsure of what he or she is seeing, partly because of the dashes, but also because of the words used to describe the scene. As the eye is observed looking for something, then becoming cloudy and progressing through more obscurity until it finally comes to rest, the person observing the death cannot provide any definite proof that what the dying person saw was hopeful or disturbing. The dying person seems to have no control over the clouds covering his or her eye, which is frantically searching for something that it can only hope to find before the clouds totally consume it. Death, as an uncontrollable force, seems to sweep over the dying. More importantly, as the poem is from the point of view of the observer, whether the dying person saw anything or not is not as significant as what the observer, and the reader, carry away from the poem. The suspicion of whether the dying person saw anything or had any control over his or her death is what is being played on in the poem. If the dying person has no control, what kind of power does that give death? Did the eye find what it was looking for before the clouds billowed across their vision, and was it hopeful? These questions represent the main idea the poem is trying to convey. Death forces itself upon the dying leaving them no control, and if something hopeful exists to be seen after death, it is a question left for the living to ponder.
Another reason that she was affected by her life was that her mother was not “emotionally accessible”. She was not close to her mother and never shared any of her feelings with her, which most daughters feel they can. This might have caused Emily to be very weird and strange. The Dickinson children were also raised in the Christian tradition, and were expected to take up their father’s religious beliefs and values without any fighting or arguing. Emily did not like than she can not chose for herself her own beliefs and religion.
Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest woman poets. She left us with numerous works that show us her secluded world. Like other major artists of nineteenth-century American introspection such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, Dickinson makes poetic use of her vacillations between doubt and faith. The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the meter of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language.
In conclusion, it can be stated the examples of Emily Dickinson's work discussed in this essay show the poetess to be highly skilled in the use of humor and irony. The use of these two tools in her poems is to stress a point or idea the poetess is trying to express, rather than being an end in themselves. These two tools allow her to present serious critiques of her society and the place she feels she has been allocated into by masking her concerns in a light-hearted, irreverent tone.
Emily Dickinson, a radical feminist is often expressing her viewpoints on issues of gender inequality in society. Her poems often highlight these viewpoints. Such as with the case of her poem, They shut me up in Prose. Which she place herself into the poem itself, and address the outlining issues of such a dividend society. She is often noted for using dashes that seem to be disruptive in the text itself. Dickinson uses these disruption in her text to signify her viewpoints on conflictual issues that reside in society. From the inequality that women face, to religion, to what foreseeable future she would like to happen. All of her values and morales are upheld by the dashes that Dickinson introduces into her poems.
Many of her poems were a reaction to the rejection of many publishers and other literary critics. This particular poem’s character comes from Dickinson’s reaction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement that “poets are thus liberating gods.” Here she is challenging the established literati by questioning popular Emersonian views. In particular, this poem is a reaction to Emerson’s belief that “the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.” Basically, it is a reaction to the idea that the poet is the creator of beautiful words, liberating the common people by giving them words they would not have access to.
Both these stories involve darkness but they are used in 2 different ways. In the story, “We grow accustomed to the dark,” The author Dickinson’s is talking about how she is becoming accustomed to the dark.. In the story “Before I got my eye put out” she talks about how life was with vision and how she took advantage of having good sight. It shows you to not be ungrateful about stuff in your life because any second it could be gone.
Therefore, her vision of sight is a metaphor of the way we actually react to this confusion just when she quoted “ A moment- we uncertain step for newness of the night” ( Dickinson; lines 5-6). No doubt, in the first stanza, she protests that we can get used to that trouble just like the way we react to the darkness. If the darkness means uncertainty, then the road in the poem refers to the future. We are never sure where the future is leading us and so we need to be brave and courageous just like when she said” Fit our vision to the dark and meet the road”- erect- ( Dickinson; lines 7-8) .