Thursday, January 26, 2012

Understanding Dickinson

      The class discussion on Emily Dickinson's poems today, 1/26, opened up my eyes so as to see what others see when they read her poetry. Dark and ominous are two words I would certainly seek to describe her works, especially on the three we focused on in class. All pertaining to death, we decided, and we all had a unique viewpoint on what kind of story she was trying to tell.
      Interesting enough, my last blog post mentioned poem 764 which is the poem my group and I tried to decipher in class today, coincidentally. It was an eye-opening experience discussing and digesting the poem together because her poems really create a sense of uneasiness, mixed with a dreary feeling upon reading them. As we discussed and dissected, we decided almost immediately that Dickinson was personifying an inanimate object, in this case, a loaded gun which she so boldly starts the poem by adopting the character of the gun in the first line. What I failed to notice the first time reading through and digging to find meaning was the fourth stanza where she mentions what the gun does at night, which adds even more personification as it provides variation in relation to time, which is a human trait. I think this is where the poem really comes together and gives the reader a sense of solidarity and a means to understand the speaker, the gun. It reads, "And when at Night - Our good Day done - / I guard My Master's Head / 'Tis better than the Eider Duck's / Deep Pillow- to have shared -" When I read this I have such a vivid picture in my mind's eye of the gun's master (the gun owner) using the gun during the day, to kill as mentioned later in the poem, and sleeping with it beneath his pillow at night. Overall, an eerie poem but this stanza made everything come together for me.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

On Emily Dickinson

One the poem that we were asked to pay particular attention to was poem 764 and it also happens to be one of the more interesting ones that I read in this section. Upon reading the introduction, I was interested to see whether or not the revisions that men who had published her work had made on it would be apparent. I imagine Emily Dickinson's writing to be whimsical in style and more vast in terms of rhyme and rhythm. This particular poem broke out of the norm that I noticed in the rest of her works that were put on display in this chapter because the rhyme was not consistent, making the overall voice and movement of the poem that much better.
The first line, "My Life has stood - a loaded Gun" was enough to let the reader know that her intentions in the poem and its meaning would be strong but not easily identified, given her use of typography like in her capitalization and hyphens. The poem overall gave me a sense of uneasiness from beginning to end. She shares in this poem many facets of malevolence, through the talk of foes, death, killing, and the comparison to her life as a loaded gun, as I pointed out in the first line. The last two lines, in my opinion, are the two most noteworthy, possibly in the entire works selected in this chapter. And it is what I will end this post on, "For I have the power to kill, / Without - the power to die -"