Emily Dickinson 1489 Analysis

One of Emily Dickinson’s greatest skills is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In this sense, she reshapes how her readers view her subjects and the meaning that they have in the world. She also has the ability to assign a word to abstractness, making her poems seemingly vague and unclear on the surface. Her poems are so carefully crafted that each word can be dissected and the reader is able to uncover intense meanings and images. Often focusing on more gothic themes, Dickinson shows an appreciation for the natural world in a handful of poems. Although Dickinson’s poem #1489 seems disoriented, it produces a parallelism of experience between the speaker and the audience that encompasses the abstractness and unexpectedness of an event.
In poem #1489, the speaker never explicitly reveals the subject of the poem, which forces the reader to understand every line to discover the meaning. Through grasping the content

Dickinson writes about “every blossom on the bush”(5), often a place where you find birds perched. This is the first time that the reader is directly introduced to something pertaining to nature; therefore, it acts as a turning point in the poem. The use of the word “blossom”(5) parallels to “cochineal”(4), as both are shades of pink. By choosing to use blossoms, as opposed to a harsher word, Dickinson is able to achieve a sense of delicacy and gracefulness. This works in accordance with the way she speaks of the hummingbird’s physical appearance and movements. Dickinson also personifies the bush through her use of the verb “adjusts”(6) and “tumbled”(6). The word “adjusts”(6) implies that there has been an event that has caused a change in position, similar to how a human turns their head when watching something pass. The unusual personification of the bush emphasized the overall unexpectedness of the