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Dickinson's view about nature in her poetry
Dickinson's view about nature in her poetry
Dickinson's view about nature in her poetry
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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. The darkness described in Poem 419 is a metaphor for uncertainty; this form of darkness is temporary. In line 7, the speaker highlights the “newness of the night”. “Newness” is a reference to the unknown represented by the night, as what is new to humans is unknown since they have not experienced it yet. Furthermore, …show more content…
night is also commonly compared to the unknown because night is marked by darkness and therefore an inability to perceive what is happening. The night’s unfamiliarity causes individuals to “uncertain[ly] step (5)”, meaning that the lack of familiarity with the present leads people to walk in eggshells since humans naturally fear the unknown. The speaker also observes that the courageous people “grope a little (13)” and that “they learn to see (16)”; in other words, brave individuals do not let the unknown inhibit them. In addition, a common metaphor compares knowledge to sight in a continuation of the theme of light versus darkness. Because the courageous are not fettered by the atmosphere of uncertainty, they “learn to see”, or learn to adjust. As time progresses, “something in the sight/adjusts itself to Midnight/And Life steps almost straight (18-20)”. These final lines also continue the extended metaphor involving night and the unknown as well as the metaphor between sight and knowledge; these concluding lines also demonstrate a resolution to the fear of uncertainty described earlier in the poem. As people learn to cope with the previously unknown, “life steps almost straight”, meaning that individuals then return to a previous level of comfort. This resolution demonstrates that the fear of the unknown is a temporary affliction since humans learn how to cope. The significance of darkness in Poem 419 is that it acts as an extended metaphor for the unknown, which is supplemented by additional metaphors that show that humans learn to live with the unknown and conquer their fears of it. While the night portrayed in “Acquainted with the Night” depicts another widespread human issue (in this case, loneliness), unlike Dickinson, Frost does not indicate that this problem is temporary.
In the last line of the first stanza, the speaker announces “I have outwalked the furthest city light (3)” and in the next line continues with “I have looked down the saddest city lane (4)”. Here, the absence of light from the speaker’s “outwalk[ing] the furthest city light” is a metaphor for isolation. The urban setting of the poem makes this loneliness ironic, since the speaker is surrounded by other people yet still feels alone. The speaker’s extreme loneliness manifests itself in the way that the speaker views the city; since the speaker is lonely and sad, the lanes of the city also seem sad. Later, the speaker recounts that once “an interrupted cry / came over houses from another street (8-9)” but its purpose was “not to call me back or say good-by (10)”. These lines reference the speaker’s lack of human interaction, which only contributes to their loneliness. Soon after, in lines12 and 13, the speaker states “One luminary clock against the sky / Proclaimed that the time was neither wrong nor right”. The clock’s description as “luminary” implies that the sky is dark, complementing the poem’s bleak mood. This set of lines also contains an additional metaphor comparing life to time (which makes sense, considering that life is constrained by time); by noting that “the time was neither wrong nor right”, the speaker also reveals that the magnitude of the isolation that they have experienced is emotionally numbing. The speaker is not happy, so the time is not right; however, the speaker is so numb that they can no longer experience sadness, so the time is not wrong either. The speaker summarizes their experience with loneliness with the final line (a repetition of the opening line), “I have been one acquainted with the night (14)”. The significance of the night in
“Acquainted with the Night” is that it is used to depict human loneliness without any mention of how it is resolved, unlike Poem 419. Both poems use the negative images of night and darkness as metaphors for emotions. While Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” is an exposition of human loneliness, Dickinson’s Poem 419 focuses on human perseverance through fear of the unknown and is more empowering in this respect.
Imagery uses five senses such as visual, sound, olfactory, taste and tactile to create a sense of picture in the readers’ mind. In this poem, the speaker uses visual imagination when he wrote, “I took my time in old darkness,” making the reader visualize the past memory of the speaker in “old darkness.” The speaker tries to show the time period he chose to write the poem. The speaker is trying to illustrate one of the imagery tools, which can be used to write a poem and tries to suggest one time period which can be used to write a poem. Imagery becomes important for the reader to imagine the same picture the speaker is trying to convey. Imagery should be speculated too when writing a poem to express the big
“One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.” Said by Voltaire can describe the two poems, Seventeen by Andrew Hudgins and Traveling through the Dark by William Stafford. Both poems are written in a prose fashion but mean so much more than the written words. At a glance, the poems both seem to be about the tragic deaths of animals; however, the poems differ in their themes of growing up in Seventeen and the intermixing of technology with man and nature in Traveling through the Dark.
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.
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.
The poem talks about people being sick of society, and want to be isolated from it. Even in the first line, he made an analogy between December being dark and dingy, by saying "A winter's day - in a deep and dark December." The month of December is usually likened to being cold, dark, and 'dangerous'. He also says that it is a lonely December in the second line where he says "I am alone gazing from my window to the street below" he feels left out, and now wants to be left alone, like an island, or a rock. Like in the second poem, where he says that he "has no need of friendship."
While thinking of death, thoughts of grief, despair and worry arise. Perhaps this is a product of the darkness often times portrayed of death from contemporary literature, movies, and music. Movies such as “Schindler’s List” and music such as Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” are just a few examples of entertainment that show the darkness and finality of death. These forms of medium only present the idea, as no one who wrote them actually experienced death and therefore the dark thoughts associated with it are ambiguous. In “712 (Because I Could not Stop for Death)”, poet Emily Dickinson also shows the darkness associated but she has a different view of death. She writes from the standpoint of a narrator
The relationship of the speaker to his surroundings is introduced into the main narrative in the opening of the poem, and is specific to when this occurrence is taking place, “At midnight, in the month of June”. June is the month in which the summer solstice takes place, in the Pagan culture of this time “Midsummer was thought to be a time of magic, when evil spirits were said to appear. The pagans often wore protective garlands of herbs and flowers.” (chiff.com) Today this concoction is used by modern herbalists as a mood stabilizer. Midnight is also known as the witching hour when ghosts are considered to have their most power. Black magic is also thought to be infallible at this hour as well. The speaker of the poem describes himself as standing beneath the moon, this sublunary expulsion is pertinent to the narrative of the poem, and he is admitting his mortality in this line. The moon is personified in the fourth line “Exhales from her out her golden rim”, which is ...
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).
"In a Green Night" by Derek Walcott is a poem about the conflicting feelings of life. "In a Green Night" focuses on the ever-present threat of death, and how our lives revolve around the inevitability of death. Through metaphors, paradoxes, and repetition, Walcott exemplifies the hopelessness and glory that occur when an artist realizes that, in his quest for creating the perfect piece of art, he is ultimately growing closer to death--just as an orange tree grows closer to death as it produces its magnificent fruit.
Robert Frost’s “Design” is a poem of finding natural cruelty in the serenity of nature, a melody of understanding. Upon reading the first line, not unlike the whole poem, a joke in tone, rhythm is building up an image that grows into something else. In “Design”, the joking discovery progresses gradually through a sequence of conflicting images. . Frost uses imagery, allegory, and characterization to accomplish what could only be described as an American emblem poem. This essay will analyze Frost’s “Design”, interpreting the underlying message and overall theme Frost may have been trying to convey.
Along with the selected reading above, Dickinson’s work reflects a strong reverence for the natural world. This appreciation for nature is conveyed through a number of references and reoccurring images. In poem #627,
In her poem “It was not Death, for I stood up,” Emily Dickinson creates a depressing state of hopelessness felt by the speaker when trying to understand the tormented condition of her psychological state. The poem produces an extended metaphor of death, which resembles the speaker’s life and state of mind, through the use of various literary devices, such as parallel structure, repetition, imagery, personification, and simile, in order to create an overwhelming sense of hopelessness regarding the speaker’s undefined condition.
The vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors make his poetry elusive, through these elements Frost is able to give nature its dark side. It is these elements that must be analyzed to discover the hidden dark meaning within Roberts Frost’s poems. Lines that seemed simple at first become more complex after the reader analyzes the poem using elements of poetry. For example, in the poem Mending Wall it appears that Robert frost is talking about two man arguing about a wall but at a closer look the reader realizes that the poem is about the things that separate man from man, which can be viewed as destructive. In After Apple Picking, the darkness of nature is present through the man wanting sleep, which is symbolic of death.
It is this moment of recollection that he wonders about the contrast between the world of shadows and the world of the Ideal. It is in this moment of wonder that man struggles to reach the world of Forms through the use of reason. Anything that does not serve reason is the enemy of man. Given this, it is only logical that poetry should be eradicated from society. Poetry shifts man’s focus away from reason by presenting man with imitations of objects from the concrete world.
Emily Dickinson’s poems analyze her perception of the world and society, which is different to that of the commonly accepted, objective perception. The reader sees this perception in her poem ‘It was not Death’, where Emily appears to perceive a world full of confusion and chaos. She also observes that society tries to place people into stereotypes, and feels that she herself is restricted to one.