Emily Dickinson: Insight into Her Works
As Vincent Van Gogh once said, “If one is a master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.” Grippingly, this seems to be the case with a famous poet known as Emily Dickinson, since her passion for poetry led to her gaining insight into many topics. Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson went on to drop out of school and live the rest of her days at home with her family. There, she wrote countless amounts of poetic pieces and letters in her notebooks, which went on to be published after her death, on May 15, 1886, in Amherst. She is now considered an important stepping stone to the textual art that is literature. Because she is able to use a unique poetic style, Emily Dickinson provides her in-depth insights on life, death, and the laws of nature in her works.
Although her poems take on many forms—some of which can be difficult to comprehend—Emily Dickinson specializes in expressing her insight towards various topics, most knowingly, life. This can be proven with a few brief analyses on Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —.” By using metaphor to compare her life to a gun, Angela Estes states that Dickinson was able to describe life in three stages: past-when the gun is not used, present-when the gun is being fired, and future-when the gun no longer has bullets (Estes). Her criticism on this poem proves that Emily Dickinson utilizes her metaphoric styles to convey her insight on what life is. Additionally, another critic states the following about this work:
Nevertheless, the problematic last stanza does take us back to a place of separation and inequality. The diff...
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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.
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
Emily Dickinson is a poet known for her cryptic, confusing language. Words are often put together in an unusual way and create deciphering difficulties for the reader. But behind all the confusion is a hidden meaning that becomes clear, and one realizes that all the odd word choices were chosen for a specific reason. The poem I will try to analyze is My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun, or number 754. I find this to be one of her most difficult poems to decode. However, I find the images fascinating and the last stanza very confusing but intriguing. What I first thought the poem was about and what I finally came to a conclusion on are two completely different thoughts. Through answering questions on the poem’s literary elements, thorough analysis of the words, and rewriting the poem in my own words, I came to the conclusion that the poem is about a person who was taken on a journey with someone who saw something in her that was unrealized by anyone else, and the narrator clung to that person through their time together.
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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10th December, 1830, in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. As a young child, she showed a bright intelligence, and was able to create many recognizable writings. Many close friends and relatives in Emily’s life were taken away from her by death. Living a life of simplicity and aloofness, she wrote poetry of great power: questioning the nature of immortality and death. Although her work was influenced by great poets of the time, she published many strong poems herself. Two of Emily Dickinson’s famous poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died”, are both about life’s one few certainties, death, and that is where the similarities end.
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Within “[My Life had stood- a Loaded Gun]”, Emily references the identity of women during her time period. The poem holds the intricate
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