An Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poem 670
Have you ever been scared by your own shadow? Or have you ever been walking home at night, and nothing unusual is happening, but you can't shake this feeling that some mass murderer is following close behind, waiting to strike? Maybe you are crazy. More likely, though, you become scared by thinking of old tales or stories, like all the people who have gone into the woods and mysteriously vanished without a trace. I knew one girl who saw The Blair Witch Project and had to sleep with all the lights and the TV on that night, and still to this day won't go traipsing into the woods.
Emily Dickinson dealt a lot with the notion of us being more scared of ourselves than of our surroundings. This was from one of her more serious stages, unlike "Do" and "Autumn Rhapsody" (see the parodies here). "The Brain has Corridors-surpassing / Material Place-" Not too many people would rather meet a ghost than be within their own minds, but Dickinson challenges that notion, throwing out the idea that the thought or anticipation of a terrible event is much worse than the actual thing, like people who are afraid of needles. Most people, if you talk to them, will say they dread going to get a shot. Of course, if you approach them right as they come out of the doctor's office, they'll say it wasn't bad at all. Of course, they may be lying to save face. (A good way to tell is to look at their arm: if it looks okay, then they're telling the truth; if it has turned seven shades of blue and has swollen to the size of their neck, then they just got a tetanus shot and are bluffing about it not hurting.)
But who is "I"? Who is "ourself"? The question in itself seems quite simple, but is it? It's an interesting point that she raises, specifically within the phrase, "Ourself behind ourself, concealed-" Do we really know ourselves? How can we be behind ourselves? How many vague, rhetorical questions can I ask? Too many, obviously. Anyway, after some thought, I decided that Dickinson here is probably referring to the part of ourselves that we'd rather not know, or maybe a part of ourselves that we don't know just because we can't see it.
Mr. Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” puts on a veil to symbolize “those sad mysteries which we hid[e] from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them” (Hawthorne 310). From the moment the townsfolk see the black veil they become very frightened and intimidated by Mr. Hooper, the citizens felt that “the black veil seemed to hang down before his heart” (Hawthorne 308). People became very frightened even the “most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast” (Hawthorne 312) Mr. Hooper puts this crape on as a “symbol of a fearful secret between him and them” and because of this society chastises him and makes him out to be a...
In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for example, Hawthorne describes how, “perhaps the palefaced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them”(2). This directly contrasts the “light” faces of the members of the congregation with the darkness of the minister’s veil. By stating that the minister was just as afraid of the people as the people were of him, Hawthorne indicates that the people fear the minister due to the abrupt reveal of his mysterious sin, but the minister also somewhat fears the people and the secrets they hold deep within their hearts. The people of the town are supposedly pure and innocent, yet it is clear that many of the citizens carry the burden of their own evils. Although the minister boldly comes forward with his own sin, he still feels the pain of the loneliness, scorn, and spite that has come with his statement. Hawthorne represents the discomfort the guilty townspeople feel when in the presence of Mr. Hooper when he describes how they were, “conscious of lighter spirits the moment they lost sight of the black veil” (3). Once again, this use of light and dark imagery supports Hawthorne’s argument that people, even those who claim to be pure and innocent, are capable of sin. The townspeople in Mr. Hooper’s community feel the burden of their own sins when they come in
Fear is an idea that almost everyone deals with in a lifetime. Terror is a shared emotion, but is provoked in different ways, such as spiders or clowns. A common fear is a fear of being alone physically or emotionally. Isolation in thought tends to grow this fear since original thoughts are difficult to explain if no one else has ever come to the same conclusions. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple in Romancing opiates deals with the same issue. Seeing life in a new perspective can lead to fear of self-validation, madness from being alone in one’s own ideas, and feeling ignored.
Lang, H.J. “How Ambiguous is Hawthorne?” In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
We’re getting close to October and all the scary movie lovers and thrill-seekers gather around and prepare to be scared. However, have we ever thought of why most of us enjoy being scared? The article, “Why Do Some Brains Enjoy Fear?” written by Allegra Ringo explores the science behind supernatural and physical thrills. The reality of something supernatural or somewhat human like but not exactly tears us apart and leaves us wanting more. Most people enjoy the possibilities of a greater form after life and death. All around the world most people are intrigued by ghosts, demons, spirits, hybrids of humans and such, monsters, and even non humans. The answer to the previous question is because of the hype of it all. When
Reading a poem by Emily Dickinson can often lead the reader to a rather introspective state. Dickinson writes at length about the drastically transformative effect a book may have upon its’ reader. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Dickinson masterfully uses the ballad meter to tell a story about the ecstasy brought by reading. In poem number 1587, she writes about the changes wrought upon the reader by a book and the liberty literature brings.
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10th, 1830. She grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. When she was middle age, she didn’t come out of her house very often; she didn’t even attend her father’s funeral. It was said to be that she was depressed, she had epilepsy, agoraphobia, or social anxiety. She only communicated with her family through letters. In 1884 she fell ill due to kidney failure. Sight is what is produced from your eyes, and what is to vision means to see with your heart. In Before I got my eye put out and We Grow Accustomed to the Dark both have an underlying meaning. Some may perceive it to be literal, and some may see it to be something deeper. These poems both have a deeper meaning, she could have had an accident, lost her vision, and her sight to appreciate being able to see would be a bit understated. Some don’t appreciate what we have until they’ve lost it.
Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.
Emily Dickinson in her poem anthology had many, varied attitudes towards many questions about both life and death. She expressed these in a great variety of tones throughout each of her poems and the speaker in these individual poems is often hard for the reader to identify. In many of her poems, she preferred to conceal the specific causes and nature of her deepest feelings, especially experiences of suffering, and her subjects flow so much into one another in language and conception that it is often difficult to tell if she is writing about people or God, nature or society, spirit or art. Dickinson was a very diverse poet, constantly having hidden meanings and different poetic schemes in her poems, she was all over the place. In many
Many of fad diets rely on gimmicks, things that makes the diet seem to be unique or more likely to work than other
In the short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the Mr. Hooper’s black veil and the words that can describe between him and the veil. Hawthorne demonstrates how a black veil can describe as many words. Through the story, Hawthorne introduces the reader to Mr. Hooper, a parson in Milford meeting-house and a gentlemanly person, who wears a black veil. Therefore, Mr. Hooper rejects from his finance and his people, because they ask him to move the veil, but he does not want to do it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Mr. Hooper’s black veil symbolizes sins, darkness, and secrecy in order to determine sins that he cannot tell to anyone, darkness around his face and neighbors, and secrecy about the black veil.
Emily Dickinson was a nineteenth – century American writer whose poems changed the way people perceive poetry. She is one of the most mysterious writers of all times. Her personal life and her works are still the cause of debates and are not fully solved. Her poems are dedicated to life and finding the real truth. Her two poems: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” and “Much madness is divinest sense” represent Dickinson’s quest to reveal the mystery and truth of life. In order to fully understand Dickinson’s poems, one must learn about her personal and historical event such as “The Second Great Awakening” and “The United States women’s suffrage movement “surrounding her life that contributed to the creation of her works.
Hopelessness is an intense emotion every person feels at one point in their life, a feeling closely interlinked with depression and suicide. In the poems “It was not Death, for I stood up,” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” by Emily Dickinson and “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the theme of the poems is hopelessness, but the authors approach the theme differently in each poem.
Emily Dickinson was an American poet, born in Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. Emily later fell in love with a married preacher. He then, moved away with his family. It has been said that after that happened Emily became a recluse. Emily’s poems are unique because she uses unusual punctuation, for example she used dashes in place of commas. Although, her poems were very good she made her family promise her that they would burn them after she died. Emily died on May 15, 1886, her family then decided they would publish all of her poems. She wrote almost 1800 poems in total. Her poems often had themes of death and some of her poems were about love too.
The poem dramatizes the gradual process of falling apart. Dickinson speaks abstractly of the crumbling of the soul as a dimension of time, rather than being instantaneous. Man falls as a result of a continuous and small-scale decay of the spirit by way of evil inclinations. The complex structure of the poem reflects the underlying figurative meaning. The poem consists of three quatrains in iambic meter, alternating between tetrameter and trimeter. The poet’s use of hyphens guides the reader to read the passage slowly and thoughtfully. The slow pace mirrors the theme of slow decay. The most obvious factor of the poem’s structure is the seemingly random capitalization of mid-sentence nouns. The stress and personification of certain nouns emphasize the small elements of crumbling. The figurative meaning of the poem is built upon by showing that all things can be broken down, slowly but surely.