In Emily Dickinson’s lyrical poem “There’s a certain slant of light” she describes a revelation that is experienced on cold “winter afternoons.” Further she goes to say that this revelation of self “oppresses, like the Heft of Cathedral Tunes” and causes “Heavenly Hurt”, yet does not scare for it is neither exterior nor permanent. This only leaves it to be an internal feeling, and according to Dickinson that is where all the “Meanings” lie. There’s no way for this feeling to be explained, all that is known is that it is the “Seal Despair”, and an “imperial affliction”. These descriptions have a rather powerful connotation in showing the oppressive nature of his sentiment. There is an official mark of despair and an imperial affliction which is above and beyond the norm. The severity of this feeling is so powerful that even nature seems to stop; in fact the whole world comes to a halt. But when it is over it seems that nothing happened, a glimpse of death.
There is no dramatic situation that occurs in the poem. It is a description of a somber feeling that comes from nowhere and leaves without a trace. The poem is written in the third person, referring to it, the feeling. It remains in that point of view throughout the entire poem.
The use of figurative language in the poem allows Emily Dickenson to create a feeling that attaches the reader to the poetry, by tying it to an experience that the reader might have had. It...
Poetry frequently contains elements of the natural world, such as light, water, and darkness, because of the near universality of these elements. In Emily Dickinson’s Poem 419 and in Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night”, the dominant images present are of darkness and night. In both poems, darkness and night are metaphors for human problems; however, Poem 419 is optimistic whereas “Acquainted with the Night” is pessimistic.
When one reads Emily Dickinson, one is expecting a piece of writing which is full of dread and discontent in the world. This is why at first glance poem number 569, or "I reckon- When I count at all-" one instantly feels taken aback by the apparent positive imagery that is found within the writing. However upon close reading one makes a realization that the poem is just as dark as her other pieces, if not even more upsetting. Although the beginning of the poem implies the idea of poets being creators, the last stanza undermines this idea and instead portrays the image of a poet questioning if it is possible that they are unintentionally filling the minds of their readers with false hopes and ideas about the Heavens and beauty, rather than being truthful with them; leading the masses to a false sense of security in God and the Heavens through the use of their artistic language; making this image the most important one in the poem.
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.
In Emily Dickinson’s poem #336, the narrator feels a strong sense of despair and laments at having lost the physical ability to see in one eye. The narrator reflects upon the importance of sight in experiencing nature and finds a better appreciation for it now that she has lost her sight. By the end of the poem however, the narrator experiences transcendence, as she comes to the realization that through the act of imagination she is able to see far more than the limited view her eyes provided her with. Through the act of poetic writing, the narrator is able to capture the beauty of nature and engrave in into her soul. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s excerpt from “Nature”, he alludes to the significance in sight when it comes to it being able to merge the human soul with nature to create perfect unity, and as such he lays the groundwork for Dickinson’s ideas that are presented within her poem. Though Dickinson’s poem may initially seem transcendental, it can also be interpreted as a mixture of Emerson’s transcendental ideas and those that support the notion of imagination. Dickinson’s poem serves as a response to Emerson’s ideas because she adds on to his thoughts and unites his idea that there is oneness present in the world with the notion that imagination and sight serve as a bridge that connects human consciousness with nature to create this oneness that Emerson believes in.
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 never gives an absolute definition of what she is addressing in this poem and in every other poem she wrote. Michael Myers, author of Thinking and Writing About Literature, best captures this idea of open-ended conclusions says:
Through the use of imagery, diction and symbolism in these three poems, the reader can get a sense of the pain and distraught that Dickinson may have felt because of her illness. In “I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind” the speaker talks of how “my Brain had split” (2). The word “Brain” (2) is capitalized to add emphasis on the word. To have one’s brain “split” (2) gives the illusion of one’s brain actually being rendered in two. To have this actually happen wou...
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.
On the surface the poem seems to be a meditation on past events and actions, a contemplative reflection about what has gone on before. Research into the poem informs us that the poem is written with a sense of irony
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.
Have anyone ever told you not to lose sight of what you cannot see? Or that what someone see can be interpreted differently? Emily Dickinson introduced the idea of sight, and darkness in her poems during her lifetime. It all started in Boston when Emily saw an ophthalmologist about having aches in her eyes, including sensitivity to light. She later wrote two poems called “Before I got my eye put out” and “We grow accustomed to the Dark” that expressed the non-literal loss of sight, and becoming accustomed to darkness.
Emily Dickinson's "The Goal" discusses her theory that each human being lives each day striving to obtain one specific goal. She theorizes that each individual longs to fulfill one specific achievement whether "expressed" to others or is "still" (l. 2) and locked into the individual's heart.
Are You Blind or Just Walking with Your Eyes Closed? Have you ever been “blind”? I have. No I wasn’t technically sight blind, but I was blind in a sense that I didn’t know where I was going and what I was going to do. As Emily Dickinson writes, she talks about her experiences on being “blind”.
Foregrounding is a stylistic strategy and is when a “feature of the language of a text stands out in some way…yet contributes to the writer’s total meaning” (Cotrozzi, 2010, Page 21). This can be presented through deviation which is when an aspect of the text “deviates from the linguistic norm” or through parallelism which is when a part of the text is “brought to the fore” (Simpson, 2014, Page 51) with repetition of it features. Therefore the ‘norm’ is regarded as a “background against which features which are prominent because of their abnormality are placed in focus” (Leech, 2015, Page 30). The purpose of foregrounding is to draw attention to itself and allow readers to focus on “images, themes, characters…and feelings” in order for them to gain clarity thus “stimulating
Throughout Emily Dickinson’s poetry there is a reoccurring theme of death and immortality. The theme of death is further separated into two major categories including the curiosity Dickinson held of the process of dying and the feelings accompanied with it and the reaction to the death of a loved one. Two of Dickinson’s many poems that contain a theme of death include: “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” and “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”