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Imagery in Dickinson poetry
Emily dickinson figurative language
Emily dickinson figurative language
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The Use of Compression in My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson is quoted as writing to Samuel Bowles that "the old words are numb—and there a'nt any new ones" (4). This absence of variety in Dickinson's life urged her to redefine the words that already existed by creating more or less of an emphasis on certain words. She achieved this effect by omitting key words and dislocating punctuation in a sentence and therefore giving new meaning to them. In her poem My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun--, her use of compression gives more force to each fragmented sentence, breaking it up into almost metaphoric terms of the components of the gun itself.
Common in all of Dickinson's poems is the infamous "dash" or "hyphen"; it is technically designed "to connect the parts of a compound word or the parts of a word divided for any purpose" (Webster's Dictionary pg 401). Dickinson certainly took advantage of the "for any purpose" aspect of the definition when she began using the dash not only to separate a compound word, but to omit whole words, emphasize a pause or to connect two ideas without the use of conventional grammar or punctuation. In disrupting punctuation, Dickinson reveals the open nature of language that conventional punctuation seeks to regulate and makes new groupings and relationships between words apart from linguistic conventions. This is illustrated throughout the poem, beginning at the first line.
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away--
If the word "like" is added in the first line to read: "My life had stood [like] a loaded gun" there becomes too much emphasis on the...
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... it describes would be lost. My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— is the title of an experience that cannot be told literally. To compensate for this inability, Dickinson tells it in the fragmented sentences of a metaphor. Unlike Whitman and Emerson she describes the feelings of the experience by painting a picture with her words, while others describe the actual experience in words. The latter is less difficult being that the description is of a concrete and palpable experience. In Dickinson's case however, the experience is ineffable and her ability to illustrate an emotion by taking apart words, putting them back together and unconventionally punctuating a sentence is at the least commendable.
Works Cited
Denma, Kamilla. Emily Dickinson's Volcanic Punctuation. 17 Feb. 2001 *http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/11.1.Denman.html*
Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson has a speaker that is not clearly known. It may have been the poet or a persona she created. This narrator of the poem is happy that she is a nobody and does not like people that push to be somebody. She sees these people as being self-centered and superficial (cite book pg. 361). Dickinson makes great use of the hyphen to add dramatic pause between ideas within her poem. I liked reading this one aloud more than the others because of the pause. It gave the poem more depth of meaning, almost like a conversation style between the poet and another person. There is repetition of the word “How” and assonance with the words “you”, “too”, “Frog”, and “Bog”(cite poem p. 361).
The structure of this poem is complex and it tied directly into the figurative meaning. This poem consists of three quatrains written in iamic meter but with no set number of feet per line. Also, the second and fourth lines of each quatrain thyme somewhat. Perhaps the most perplexing attribute of the structure is that Dickinson capitalizes words in mid-sentence that would not normally be capitalized. This could represent decaying objects; capitalized words represent things still standing and lowercase words represent things decayed. This poem is choppy at timed, but it flows smoothly at others. Long hyphens throughout the poem slow down reading speed. This could be compared to the rate of decay. Sometimes decay is rapid, sometimes it is slow. the last three parts of the poem’s structure help create its figurative meaning.
Emily Dickerson’s poem, “My Life Stood – A Loaded Gun” is about a gun which is a personification of it's owner. The pleasure the gun takes in violence represents its owner's pleasure in violence.
In Donald E. Thackrey’s essay "The Communication of the Word," he talks about how "the power of the individual word, in particular, seems to have inspired her with nothing less than reverence" (51). Dickinson approached her poetry inductively, that is, she combined words to arrive at whatever conclusion the patterns of the words suggested, rather than starting out with a specific theme or message. Instead of purposefully working toward a final philosophical point, Dickinson preferred to use series of "staccato" inspirations (51). Dickinson frequently used words with weight in her work, and as a result her works usually cannot be grasped fully in one reading without dissecting each word individually. Often Dickinson would compile large, alternative word lists for a poetry before she would come to a decision on which word was "just right" for the impact she wished to achieve (52). For example, this poem displays Dickinson’s use of alternative, thesaurus-like lists:
only this, but Dickinson illustrates poetic skill in the unity of the poem. She makes her
She chooses this arrangement of verse in order to ordain a religious aspect into the poem, which does well to suite the theme and what she is fond of. As the recollection of the speaker’s death progresses, Dickinson uses the stanzas to mark the stages of the
The poetic work penned by Emily Dickinson is often viewed cryptically mainly due to the aspects of less punctuation and presence of destructive language that aligns imagery. For the purpose of analysis, the poem selected is Dickinson’s 754, ‘My Life has Stood – A Loaded Gun’ which was published in 1999. The poem has eluded critics and the interpretation of this work was carried out in a number of ways including frontier romanticism and a spirituality expression. On the other hand, the poem is underpinned with an extensive metaphor, in the light of which the life of the speaker becomes a loaded gun. The beginning of the poem depicts a typical American scene with the existence of a gun, a hunter, and a trip to the woods for hunting. The 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 the first stanza, the narrator says, that “I got my eye put out” (1), showing that she can now only see from one eye because of the singular use of eyes. Because she only talks of having lost sight in one eye, it can be assumed that she laments the limited vision that is now provided by her remaining eye. The narrator’s fragmented and limited vision caused by the loss of one eye is captured through the extensive use of dashes, which are used to separate the sentences, making them give a feeling of disarray and disjointedness.
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
Another way in which Dickinson uses the form of the poem to convey a message to the reader occurs on line four as she writes, "And Immortality." Eunice Glenn believes in the word "Immortality" is given a line by itself to show its importance (qtd). in Davis 107). Perhaps The most notable way in which Dickinson uses form is when she ends the poem with a dash of the. Judith Farr believes that the dash seems to indicate that the poem is never ending, just as eternity is never ending (331).
The very first line proclaims the intense metaphor of books sustaining life. By equating words to food, or something worthy of consumption, Dickinson creates an idea of literature essential to the continuation of human life. The capitalization of the word “Words” lends itself to the idea of words as their own entity, and as something with more substance than merely the words themselves. Continuing to the next line, the theme of words as food persists. The connotations of the word robust are most commonly well-fed and vigorous, so the point the narrator makes is the nourishment of the spirit can only literature can facilitate. By
No two poems are ever exactly the same. This can be shown in two of Emily Dickinson’s poems “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers and Because I could not stop for Death. If you take these two poems and compare them you will find some similarities, but overall there are a lot more differences that set them apart. She may stick to writing about topics she knows like life, nature, love, death, and religion but she makes sure that the detail in each one is different and unique. In “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers and Because I could not stop for Death there are difference in the speaker, theme, and imagery used throughout the poems.
I have heard people say that Emily Dickinson used dashes whenever she could not find the words to fully express what she meant. While this is true in one sense, it is preposterous in another. Dickinson's careful and clever choice of words does not seem to be consistent with someone who would simply enter a dash once at a loss for words. Punctuation is a necessary tool for all writers to create an effect that words alone can not. In “I died for beauty,” the dashes force the reader to pause at certain moments to intensify the suspense and sheer gravitas of what is being said. For example, in the opening line “I died for Beauty—but was scarce,” there is no word that could be placed in this line to more strongly convey the narrator's death for beauty to ...
Dickinson’s over abundant use of the hyphen is to put more voice into, to let the public know it’s her voice, technically being her “signature” as Kamilla Denman states. However, many conclude that the use of the hyphen signifies stress, which is considered to be a “female habit” (Denman). On the other hand, this poem uses the hyphen to enable a certain pause after each line to enhance the depth of her writing or message. In essence with that statement, the hyphen is just “as important as a period” since it does strengthen the psychological themes and moral of this
The waxing and waning action of the text might symbolize the constant cycles of life. The fact that the text recedes then elongates in rhythm make the reader think the speaker of the poem is not sure what steps to take in their life. The speaker might not have convinced him or herself about the suicide attempt. Many suicidal thoughts are stopped short of action and then thought about later. Dickinson writes in this style to show the opposing forces of every situation. Suicide would likely be the most contemplated decision the narrator has ever had to make.