Friday, April 22, 2016

Realistic: Emily Dickinson Poetry

Nature
  • #207 (#214) I Taste a liquor never brewed
    • talks about nature and how beautiful it is
    • bee, flower, pearl, Rhine, butterflies
    • summer day/Nature=alcohol
  • #320 (#258) There's a Certain Slant of Light
    • Death imagery: winter afternoon, weight/oppression, Cathedral tunes, despair, imperial afflictions, shadows, look of death
    • Nature imagery: landscape, slant of light, winter, afternoon, air
  • #359 (#328) A bird came down the walk 
    • biting worm in half, moving aside for beetle, bird is afraid, she offers food, he runs away
    • symbol for soul?
  • #905 (#861) Split the lark - and you'll find the music
    • Nature & Love
Death, Immortality, Religion
  • #124 (#216) Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
    • Imagery of coffins while world goes on without the people inside
  • #236 (#324) Some keep the Sabbath going to church
    • Heaven is on Earth in nature with orchard birds, wings, birdsong
    • "Instead of getting to heaven, at least, I'm going all along"
  • #202 (#185) "Faith" is a fine invention
    • For gentlemen that see
    • But microscopes are prudent
    • In an Emergency!
Mind, Soul, & Self
  • #620 (#435) Much Madness is divinest sense
    • If you agree with majority, you are deemed to have sense
    • If you disagree you are considered dangerous
  • #339 (#241) I like a look of Agony
    • Because that look is not faked
    • Because death cannot be faked
  • #598 (#632) The brain - is wider than the sky
    • The mind is the greatest thing that is because it can contain the sky & ocean & is the same weight/importance of God
  • #312 (#252) I can wade Grief
    • Author is used to Grief, can stand it easy
    • Can't do joy/happiness as well
    • Grief when controlled is turned into power
    • Give balm to giants & they'll weaken
    • Give rockiness/hardship, they'll do the impossible.
Emily Dickinson - December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886
  • An American Poet
  • Born in Amherst, MA
  • Highly introverted
  • Eccentric (locals)
  • Reluctant to greet guests early in life
  • Reluctant to leave her bedroom later in life
  • Relationships were through correspondence
  • Fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime
  • The work that was published often altered by publishers to fit conventional poetic rules of the time
  • Poems unique to the era:
    • short lines
    • typically lacked titles
    • slant rhyme
      • formed by words with similar but not identical sounds
    • unconventional capitalization and punctuation.
  • Common themes death and immortality
  • First collection of poetry published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd
  • 1955 Thomas H Johnson published a complete and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry: The Poems of Emily Dickinson
  • Celebrates limitations of self; not a transcendentalist
  • accepts her isolation and limitations
  • all life is about exclusion
  • Moments only exist now
  • Religion does not behave as active agent
  • Early stream of consciousness
  • Aware of being one of the few women in poetry
    • Wanted to provide POV of women, even women who died
    • Knowledge possessed by no man
  • Rejected patriachal attitude of Calvinism
  • Immorality conferred thru poet's voice in poem, not in soul/by God
  • Uses dashes to show anxiety and instill it in the reader.
  • Nature
    • Split the lark
    • bulb=tulip
    • you'll understand the water if you lose it
    • Scarlet Thomas = doubting Thomas
    • you heard the music, why do you have to split it? You know the music was true
    • Hymn stanza - Ironic yet not 8/6/8/6
    • Refused to convert
    • Would need to discuss rhyme scheme if asked
      • ABCB type Rhyme in "Because I could not stop for death"
  • Death
    • Faith is a fine invention
      • "Faith" in quotes
    • Uses "invention" for faith
    • Seeing for men with vision
  • "Slant of Light"
    • Light is oppressive
    • Cathedral tunes = funeral
    • Light gives heavenly _________
      • depressing, makes you feel mourn, winter
    • Despair = seal of the 4 horsemen
    • Overwhelming, kingly affection
    • not sent by God
    • hymn stanza - mocks idea of hymn, which praises, but this despairs
    • enjambed lines
      • of a line, couplet, or stanza of verse ending partway through a sentence or clause that continues in the next.

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