Emily Dickinson Flashcards
Whitman seems to exult in his ability to appropriate nature for his own purposes; in Dickinson, nature is much more
resistant to human schemes.
Dickinson read deeply. Her major literary debts were to the Bible and classic English authors, such as
Shakespeare and Milton
Aside from reading the classic English authors, Dickinson’s family subscribed to magazines and ordered books, so that she encountered the full range of English and American literature of her time, including, (among the Americans), ….
Americans, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Hawthorne, and Emerson
Dickinson found a paradoxical poetic freedom within the confines of the meter of the
“fourteener”–seven-beat lines usually broken into stanzas alternating four and three beats–familiar to her from earliest childhood.
The “fourteener” is the meter of Dickinson’s poetry, but also
nursery rhymes, ballads, church hymns, and some classic English poetry–strongly rhythmical, easy to memorize and recite.
Though Dickinson inhabited the confines of the fourteener, she broke open its formal possibilities by using
dashes, syntactical fragments, enjambment, slant rhyme
In “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,” the chorister is replaced by a bobolink. What is a bobolink and what’s noteworthy about it?
It’s a small, “New-World blackbird”; a native to the Americas.
What’s the significance of being Nobody in “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
Being Somebody involves naming and being identified–limiting or restricting the self and being restricted to selfhood by others. In the first stanza, where Nobody is the subject, there are no descriptors, no imagery–it remains abstract and free from the constraints of identity.
Can you think of a Dickinson poem from your list that breaks the fourteener / ballad stanza?
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The third and fourth lines have a kind of metrical enjambment where the missing fourth beat of the third line comes at the beginning of the fourth:
“Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell! they’d advertise - you know!”
What is dying in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”?
I think it’s the speaker’s consciousness or intellect descending into a state of non-reflecting being. The movement is away from cognitive thinking and toward pure feeling: from the head (“my Brain”), which feels like an attic space given the creaky floorboards–clearly there is space below. Then we go to the heart (“A Service, like a Drum - / Kept beating - beating - till I thought / My mind was going numb -“) and then to “my Soul” which is either abstract or could be localized along the spine, as it was in some philosophies, and then we just get into sense–she’s an “Ear”–pure sense. Then as they’re stepping with their heavy boots, carrying her intellect out, a plank in Reason broke and she drops. The coffin literally crashes through floor after floor, world after world, until the sentence just breaks off, consciousness lost (“And finished knowing - then -“). The unfinished feeling is powerfully accentuated by the extreme slant of the last rhyme: down/then
What is the meter of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”?
It starts with two heroic couplets and ends with one. In the middle (including all of the middle stanzas and the beginning couplet of the last stanza) features a mixture of tetrameter, dimeter, and trimeter)
What is the significance of the strange meter in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes?”
The heroic couplets are stately–enduring the funereal sermon. The middle stanza, which depicts a clock (“The Feet, mechanical, go round,” “A Quartz contentment, like a stone”) which invite us to see the relativity of time, or make us think about change, or else simply get us thinking about meter. We regain the stately heroic couplet by the end but it is petering into the chill, stupor, and letting go spoken of in the lines.
What do you make of the line “I could not see to see”?
I take it to mean she has lost the reflexive aspect of consciousness–seeing to see can be taken as a figurative seeing of literal sight–which is linked to self-awareness or sentience. On its own the line doesn’t excite me that much; what makes it incredible is that this is truly the moment that the King is in the room, taking her away. And the King is not a man in a white robe but a fly–prepared to consume her body when she dies. It’s corruption. Death is astoundingly prosaic and naturalistic–it is impervious to the anthropomorphic imagination.
