Opposite House

Question 1

Contour 1

Answer 1

Stanzas 1-3, ED domesticates death as a ubiquitous reality of civil war life in provincial towns like Amherst. HW, poem is also gothicised (poem’s most important conflation), made abject, with ED accentuating death’s corporeality (dark embodied realities) as well as its mystery. Dickinson spears to criticise social routines like the cult of death which in their attempts to endow a sense of control over the unknowable, end up obfuscating death’s horrors and inevitability

Question 2

Contour 2

Answer 2

In stanzas 4-6, Dickinson’s criticism refines itself to become more focused on religious beliefs and customs (rather than social ones). Through her implied criticism of the minister, Dickinson exposes the fleeting nature of religious beliefs and customs around death and the afterlife which fail to contain or explain death’s mystery. ‘Dark parade’ takes us to the heart of Dickinson’s point: conventions in and around death, including those which seek to etherealize and sentimentalise death through the beauty, pomp and ceremony of religious ritual, elide the gothic unknowability of death that has been alluded to throughout the poem.

Question 3

C1
‘There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House,/ As lately as Today -‘
‘numb look’

Answer 3

> Characteristically abrupt 1st line / Clinical tone.
Reporting basic facts of death.
Adjective
-clinical lang + adj. ‘numb’ creates impassive tone -> reflects broader cultural (+ human) tendency evade death’s pain + mystery thru routine/ritual/ceremony

Question 4

C1
‘The Neighbours rustle in and out’
‘mechanically’

Answer 4

> 3 clipped monosyllables
Adverb
-mourners ‘in and out’ (monosyllables) + window opening ‘mechanically’ (adverb) indicate culture attempting 2 console itself thru Ars Moriendi traditions confer ↑ clarity + control in face death

Question 5

C1
‘flings’

‘They wonder if it died — on that -

Answer 5

> Verb connotations >Pronouns it + that / >Caesura and dash
-ED draws attn to death’s persistent Gothicism / person who’s died becomes ↑ abject corpse for disposal /pronouns are dehumanizing
-punct. ↑ sense repulsion + fixation

Question 6

C1
‘I used to – when a boy’

Answer 6

> Intrusion of memory / foreshadowing
-despite speaker’s apparent power to express (+ thus to some extent control) death w. lang, this implies speaker will one day die / draws equivalence btw corpse + speaker (inev. death)

Question 7

C2
‘The Minister — goes stiffly in — As if the House were His - ’ ‘— now —

Answer 7

> Connotations
-formality + fakeness / rigor mortis of corpse will one day apply to Min
Simile + alliteration

Question 8

C2
‘There’ll be that Dark Parade’

‘Of Tassels — and of Coaches’

Answer 8

> Concrete line break / Oxymoron
-line break makes concrete the spatial break of coffin leaving house to join funeral procession in future.
Noun connotations
oxymoron combines gothic gloominess + ostentatious display / ED chastises religious +social customs for disguising death stark horror w/ beauty + trappings of ceremony.

Question 9

C2
‘It’s easy as a Sign’

Answer 9

> Simile
-belies EDs criticism ie: religious traditions obfuscate death by reducing it to signs (ie: religious and social routines)

t/f as always EDs preference = confront death unflinchingly / acknow the gothic realities of death will always haunt the domestic

Question 10

WHAT

Answer 10

In Passage __, a male speaker blends the domestic and gothic while reporting on a neighbourhood death.