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Emily Dickinson's style of poetry
Emily Dickinson's style of poetry
Emily Dickinson's style of poetry
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Recommended: Emily Dickinson's style of poetry
“I Heard a Fly buzz” by Emily Dickerson shows how it feels to be lying on your deathbed taking in your surroundings, then being stopped by an annoying evil. This poem gracefully describes the surroundings of a dying woman and how easily it can be for something to ruin something in a matter of minutes. It’s depressing that one day we will all pass and something as small as a fly can ruin our final moments on Earth just by being present in the same room we are. Emily Dickerson does a great job of making the reader understand what its like to be in the speaker’s place, by placing small pauses in every stanza it makes the reader pause to understand what they just read. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” (1) starts this poem hitting the ground running with what seems to be a boring observation about something we see everyday, however she turns it into a ghostly tale with just three words. That’s what makes this unique. Any other group of words and it would just be a dull emotionless line, but she puts “when I died” almost as an after thought. It’s as if she’s more interesting in the fly b...
Dickinson, Emily. “I heard a fly buzz – when I died.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and writing. Seventh Edition. X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia. Saddle River. Pearson Education, 2013. 776. Print.
In this poem, the speaker’s encounter with death is similar to a courtship. In the first stanza of the poem the character Death is introduced as playing the role of the speaker’s suitor. In this way, this poem about death takes on an unexpected light tone, giving the reader a sense that the speaker is content to die and able to approach it with a sense of calm. Death’s carriage is also introduced in this stanza serving as a metaphor for the way in which we make our final passage to death. The final line in this stanza introduces a third passenger in the carriage. Both the uses of Immortality, the third passenger, as well as the use of Death are examples of personification.
Comparing and Contrasting Dickinson’s Poems, Because I Could Not Stop for Death and I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died
Death is a reality that can be interpreted in many ways. Some people fear the possibility of no longer living and others welcome the opportunity for a new life in the afterlife. Many poets have been inspired by death, be it by the approaching death of loved ones or a battle for immortality. Just as each poet is inspired differently, each poem casts a different hue of light on the topic of death giving readers a unique way to look at death.
Death can both be a painful and serious topic, but in the hands of the right poet it can be so natural and eloquently put together. This is the case in The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe, as tackles the topic of death in an uncanny way. This poem is important, because it may be about the poet’s feelings towards his mother’s death, as well as a person who is coming to terms with a loved ones passing. In the poem, Poe presents a speaker who uses various literary devices such as couplet, end-stopped line, alliteration, image, consonance, and apostrophe to dramatize coming to terms with the death of a loved one.
Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime that dealt with death. She seemed to have an almost morbid fascination with the subject. Her poem "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died" is one of the many poems she wrote about this ghastly topic. The symbols she used make this poem interesting because they can be interpreted on more than one level. The punctuation and capitalization used also give the poem an abstract quality. Like much of Dickinson's poetry, this poem is both startling and somber.
... into this poem, there is still a vast amount of mystery behind the true meaning Dickinson was trying to portray.” I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died” is one of many poems written by Emily Dickinson but has to be one of the more complexly written ones. This poem leaving the reader with the choice of how to take death upon them, with gratefulness of what has already happed or fear of what did not.
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
...and its corpse before he got a formal resting place. The fifth stanza has phrases such as “carnal sun”, “hymn of flies”, and “death breeding in his lively eyes” to describe the dog that Wilbur saw in his dreams. These phrases help show us the scary image and help us understand why it was a nightmare. The words “hymn of flies” also have a deeper meaning. A hymn is normally sung at a funeral, and in the poem, the dog is dead. To the persona, the buzz of the flies sound like a sad hymn.
Reading is part of everyday life, but understanding what you have read is something less common. There are a lot of different types of literate that you can read. One of the most popular types of reading that people do would be to read poetry, but almost everyone that reads poetry reads the most common type; the ones that rhyme and are easy to read. These are very good poems, but when you begin to read different types of poetry you start to figure out that a lot of it seems to be nonsense and this is not the case. “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” (Auden) This is a very good point because poetry is something that seems to be very clear, until you get to feelings and everyone has different feelings. Poetry is something that can be written in a lot of different ways, in fact there is even poetry about how to write poetry. Archibald MacLeish and Marianne Moore all manage to tie in how poetry is supposed to work in their own poetry. They both do have conflict in some of their ideas in how to write poetry and some ideas are the same. Marianne Moore, and Archibald MacLeish share the same love and passion for poetry but have different opinions on how they should be different.
The speaker started the poem by desiring the privilege of death through the use of similes, metaphors, and several other forms of language. As the events progress, the speaker gradually changes their mind because of the many complications that death evokes. The speaker is discontent because of human nature; the searching for something better, although there is none. The use of language throughout this poem emphasized these emotions, and allowed the reader the opportunity to understand what the speaker felt.
Similar to Shakespeare, Dickinson choses to put into use the iambic pentameter. The use of the meter enhances the poem, enabling the reader to go through the text with an easy rhythm in which one can digest the passage. “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died” is a very complex poem, that may be difficult to analyze, but by breaking the poem apart piece by piece, using the iambic pentameter, analyzation becomes much easier. “I heard /a Fly /buzz - when /I died -/” (1) the pentameter stresses heard, fly, when, and died. Using those clues it is noted that the speaker is perhaps no longer living, based on the fact that he or she said “when” and “died”, which is past tense.the next three lines “The Still/ness in/ the Room/, Was like/ the Still/ness in/ the Air -/, Between /the Heaves/ of
In these poems, the reader can see the vivid images that Emily Dickinson describes as death. The overall point of the references to death seems to be that it is nothing to be worried about. In these poems, the reader sees death as a pain reliever, as an insignificant fly, and as a gentleman. Perhaps these pictures are simply ways that Dickinson shows death as pleasant and undeniable.
Because it has become so familiar, death is no longer a frightening presence, but a comforting companion. Despite this, Dickinson is still not above fear, showing that nothing is static and even the most resolute person is truly sure of anything. This point is further proven in “I Heard a Fly Buzz”, where a fly disrupts the last moment of Dickinson’s life. The fly is a symbol of death, and of uncertainty, because though it represents something certain—her impending death—it flies around unsure with a “stumbling buzz”. This again illustrates the changing nature of life, and even death.
When we first started the poetry unit, I felt that I would hate reading and creating poetry. When I heard we had to read poetry I was very disappointed. Every other year we did poetry units, I hated it. I hated every part of it. I dreaded reading poetry and answering the questions. I mostly felt this way because I am a factual person. I always have to have one right answer. I do not like when there are more than one answer choices that are correct. Poetry always has more than one interpretation.This year, however, hearing poetry and writing my own poetry has changed my opinion on poetry. Although I still hate answering questions on the poems I love to listen to poetry and write my own poetry. But, even when you read the poems that I write they are very straightforward and there are usually no other ways to interpret it.