Emily Dickinson Heartbreak Essay

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The Poetry of Heartbreak Many people love to read poems of happy love, the kind of love that makes you feel good and hopeful. Some of these poems are even made to song, which we can find ourselves listening to during weddings and sweet moments throughout our lives. However, love is not always happy nor endearing and sometimes the love that we read about is angry, broken, and sad. We can find these heartbreaking poems on the radio, in fact, we probably listen to them quite often. Songs such as “Love is a Battlefield” by the infamous Pat Benatar, or “What Hurts the Most” by the Rascal Flatts carry upbeat, beaten down lyrics that remind us that love is not always so sweet. Even the elegantly spoken, Emily Dickinson who is famous for her deep …show more content…

Emily Dickinson writes her poem of heartbreak entitled, “Not with the club, the Heart is broken.” The title also happens to be the first line of her ingenious poem. Here she is saying that the heart isn’t broken by materialistic things. That it is not the club that can emotionally break the heart. We obviously can assume that what can break the heart is love, however, she never mentions the word love in this poem. But in fact, she describes love as “a whip so small you could not see it.” Then Dickinson basically says that she would know because she has seen this whip of heartbreak before. In fact, she says, “it lashed the magic creature til it fell.” The magic creature is her heart, and she experienced heartbreak so great that it made her heart fall. By using the word “fell” I am assuming she means to die. But, she won’t directly who had broken her heart and why, but instead she personifies the whip and says “Yet the whip’s name to noble than to tell.” However, the last stanza reveals that Emily still had a soft spot in her heart for love. “Magnanimous of bird by boy described- To sing unto the stone of which it died.” Here, Emily basically says she (the bird) still talks (sings) to the stone (the cold hearted person) that broke her heart (which it

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