ED-Frost Flashcards
No quote
‘The frost of death’
‘passive flower’
Hymnal metricality
conceit
→Belies speaker’s panic in the face of death
Death (masc)= cold assassin / life (fem / in singular sense) = flower
“Secure your flower”
command
→Death = imperious + taunting
‘like soldiers fighting with a leak, we fought mortality’
Militaristic simile + inclusive lang
→‘we’ + militaristic imagery →humanity’s effortful but futile attempts to prevent death
‘To sea..To mountain…to the sun.’ + ‘to crawl the frost begun’
Anaphora Enjambment + inversion
→Repeated attempts use nature’s benevolence to revive flower but nature = indifferent for ‘to crawl the frost begun’
→Enjambment 7 →8 creates lexical crawl from one line to the next / inversion makes ‘to crawl’ fronted. This all dramatizes insidiousness + inevitability frost’s (death’s) arrival
Addition of extra line S3 lack of dashes
“pried” + “wedged”
Metrical + punctuation features
Dynamic verbs
→renders concrete speaker’s futile attempt to wedge themselves btw. Frost + flower / removal lacunae prevent penetration death
→kinetic verbs = desperate physical effort resist death
‘easy as the narrow snake, he forked’
Simile
Verb connotations
→death easily breaches all defenses/ ‘forked’ = malicious, serpentine connot
→(ext): death in nature = masc (phallic imagery) →speaker rails against death but also all-encompassing patriarchal structures inimical to female liberation∴1stcontour reveals speaker’s desp attempt to prevent death, resulting in discovery of death’s brutal inevitability + hostility in nature + failure romantic + trans. Philosophical traditions which would remove sting of death
“beauty bent”
Plosive alliteration
verb
(speaker moves from futile struggle to impotent rage)
→Flower’s fragile beauty + sudden assassination (disfiguring connot. ‘bent’) / plosive sounds accentuate frost’s brutality
‘We hunted him to his ravine / we chased him to his den.’
Anaphora Verbs
Inclusive pronouns
Natural imagery (ravine, den)
→dramatises vengeful pursuit death/ death becomes monster + retreats to cavernous spaces w/in nature (death = inextricable part nature)
“We hated death and hated life”
Parallelism
Death = inextricable part life / hatred + bitter resentment of speaker having to accept this fact
“Than Sea and continent there is a larger, it is woe.”
Ironic simile
Woe = larger all nature’s (presumably eternal + benign) processes
Ironic (+protomodern) b/c distress of single + transient psychology = ↑painful + significant than anything eternal ∴Dickinson gives voice to + affirms the suffering of a human speaker, who like the ‘passive flower’, must accept the brutality of a universe (+God) that requires them to die
