...Thesis Statement Emily Dickinson’s poem “There is no Frigate like a Book” is a great example of the use of metaphor in poetry. The poem utilizes the theme of escape in describing how a book can carry a person away from reality. In using these metaphors, Dickinson is able to describe in only eight lines the power of literature and poetry on a person’s life. Outline 1. Introduction a. Thesis Statement 2. Theme a. Theme of the poem b. Poem’s setting c. Significance of the title to the poem’s content or meaning d. Mood of the poem e. Narrator of the poem 3. Conclusion Emily Dickinson’s poem “There is no Frigate like a Book” is a great example of the use of metaphor in poetry. The poem utilizes the theme of escape in describing how a book can carry a person away from reality. In using these metaphors, Dickinson is able to describe in only eight lines the power of literature and poetry on a person’s life. The main theme of the poem seems to be that of escape. Escape from reality may be what the author is trying to demonstrate. Books do have a way of transporting the human mind to other places and realities. As such, it makes sense that a book, poem, or other form of literature would be an escape from a person’s present reality. The poem could be literal, but it is situational in style. It is showing the situation of escape through books. “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away” is the opening line in Dickinson’s poem. A frigate is...
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...some find poetry entertaining. Two of the greatest American poets are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. These 1800s poets have a unique writing style; however, on opposite ends of the poetry spectrum. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman only share a few similarities. They were extravagant composers in the late 1800s; furthermore, they both contributed to the American literature collection. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman poems enclosed poetic lines and stanzas. Their poems were modern and challenged the traditional characteristics, and they both choose to write about mundane principals (Howard). The two poet’s contents are extremely different. Emily Dickinson would write about the conventional circumstances and discus the brutal side of life. Emily Dickinson would place a vast amount of symbolism and imagery. Since Emily Dickinson isolated herself, her verses would contain ample amounts depressing thoughts. She would also devise about her own ideas and what she was passionate about (Calvano). Walt Whitman uttered his courageous personality in his writings. Needing an idea to write about, Walt Whitman would take something that was decent in life and then just...
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... “I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain” If one does not know much about poetry, they might think that a sixteen-stanza poem does not have abundant meaning. Little do they know, although, there aren’t many lines, it can be the most meaningful text. The poem I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain, is a sixteen-stanza poem that uses metaphors to describe a situation or feeling (depending on how the reader or critic interprets the poem). I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain by Emily Dickinson has substantial reviews and critics’ critical information on this poem. Each critic reviews a poem differently and all have a different interpretation on this particular poem. Although all of the interpretations are all on the same poem, they all have something different that critic distinguished. I, personally, viewed I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain, as if Emily Dickinson is mourning on how morose and depressed she is. But at the end she finds happiness (stanza 4) where she lets go of the gloomy funeral inside her brain. I found Emily Dickinson’s poem, I Felt A Funeral, In My brain, quite evasive at first. After picking apart the poem, and reading Dickinson’s...
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...Emily Dickinson views love with an allegorical neatness created in her poem The Love of Thee—a Prism Be. Dickinson believes that it is the prismatic quality of passion that matters, and the energy passing through an experience of love reveals a spectrum of possibilities. In keeping with her tradition of looking at the "circumference" of an idea, Dickinson never actually defines a conclusive love or lover at the end of her love poetry, instead concentrating on passion as a whole. Although she never defined a lover in her poems, many critics do believe that the object or focal point of her passion was Charles Wadsworth, a clergyman from Philadelphia. Throughout Emily’s life she held emotionally compelling relationships with both men and women. The differences in the prismatic qualities of each type of relationship come through in Dickinson’s prism imagery. Morris summarizes these differences in her essay: In one [male prism] the supremacy of the patriarch informs the rituals of courtship, family, government, and religion; in the other [female prism], the implied equality of sisterhood is played out in ceremonies of romantic, familial, social, and even religious reciprocity. (103) In her poetry, Emily represents the males as the Lover, Father, King, Lord, and Master as the women take complimentary positions to their male superiors, and many times the relationship between the sexes is seen in metaphor—women as "His Little Spaniel" or his hunting gun. The woman’s existence...
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...stop for Death” (Emily Dickinson) are unique in their own way however, I feel that two poems in particular may show more similarity in each other versus all three being compared at once although, I will be comparing and contrasting all three poems towards the end of this essay. For example, When reading “Funeral Blues” (W. H. Auden), I felt a greater sense of similarity to “Because I could not stop for death” (Emily Dickinson) versus “Death, be not proud” (John Donne) so I will begin to discuss those poems first. When comparing each poem I will list the related styles between the two and the same for contrasting each when discussing the distinctive differences. In “Funeral Blues”; a poem about the mourning of a dear loved one, Auden used a great sense of imagery when writing to assist the audience in creating a mental picture. Each line used a great amount of detail for example, when Auden wrote “Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead scribbling in the sky the message he is dead.” It was easy for me to actually picture this statement mentally due to his choice of words. Also, he uses a rhyme scheme that is successful in expressing the deep mourning and sorrow that he feels. The same feelings expressed in “Funeral Blues” can also be felt in “Because I could not stop for death” (Emily Dickinson). As in Auden’s poem when speaking of his sadness about the love of his life now deceased, Emily writes about her ride with a gentleman that she meets (death). Emily too uses a similar...
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...educated was determined as well. The passages from Lauren Axelrod and my point of view provided a sound transcribed breakdown. Self-empowerment is gained through knowledge. I found myself following the guidance of the author, during my reflection and brainstorming for this essay, and pursued the guidelines on pages eighty nine and ninety. As what needed to be followed in the instructions was stated, some of the wide-ranging generalities and expectations that came to mind while thinking over the words knowledge and individual power are what I penned down. The way toward individual power above one’s individual atmosphere is paved by the possession of knowledge. The ability for you to be a much sounder person and to be able to progress the surroundings for those that are around you. An ideology and the power is instilled in you that you will be confidently encouraged to feel and live better. Assistance in coming up with better choices and lead you in the direction of righteousness in your everyday life is received from knowledge and individual power. The readings that I selected were “Crazy Courage” by Alma Luz Villanueva, “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, and “Much madness is divinest sense” by Emily Dickinson. I logged on to the internet upon completion...
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...person it could be the most boring, uninteresting, and redundant piece of literature they have ever read. In this semester of Literature 221, I was given the opportunity to read works from many different genres, time periods, and styles of writing. Some of which, like Emily Dickinson’s Life I and Life XLIII, Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, and Sherman Alexie’s What You Pawn I Will Redeem I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from. While others such as Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, Mark Twain’s excerpt When The Buffalo Climbed a Tree from Roughing It, and the excerpt from Sula by Toni Morrison weren’t exactly my cup of tea. Emily Dickinson is a remarkable poet who often writes from a very emotional and self-examining perspective. This is why I really enjoyed the two selections of her work we had to read this semester. In her first poem Life I, the very first two lines make you stop and think, “I’M nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?” (Dickinson 2) Bam! I was hit in the face with self-reflection. Am I somebody? Or am I a nobody? Emily Dickinson continues by saying “how dreary to be somebody!” (Dickinson2 ) as if to be somebody is a bad thing. I love that Emily Dickinson questions the ideology of having to be surrounded by people and having to constantly be in a spotlight. Every move that you make is questioned and examined by people. Instead of being able to live for yourself and for your own happiness you are forced to live by the way...
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...Explication Essay Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest American poets to date. She was most well known for her odd punctuation and capitalization that she would use to emphasize certain things that were important to the poem. “I like a look of Agony” is a short poem that seems very dark until it is analyzed. It begins with Dickinson stating that she likes the look of agony because she knows that it is true. “I like a look of Agony, / Because I know it's true— / Men do not sham Convulsion, / Nor simulate, a Throe—”(1-4). This first stanza speaks volumes about the message that Emily Dickinson is trying to send to those who read the poem. When she states, “I like a look of Agony, / Because I know it’s true—”(1-2), she is saying that when she sees a person who looks like they are in pain or struggling, she knows that their emotion is true, because a person can not fake pain. She reiterates this point with the next two lines when she says, “Men do not sham Convulsion, / Nor simulate, a Throe—”(3-4). Those lines are saying that a person can not fake convulsions, or reactions to pain, and that they can not fake a throe, which is another type of reaction to pain. Throughout this stanza Dickinson chooses to capitalize...
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...Thinking Essay Kim Groninga “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson Most people feel invisible at some point in their lives; whether it’s because they’re in the shadow of an older sibling, because they are shy, or simply because everyone around them has been busy, it doesn’t make much difference. It’s still a horrible thing to feel like no one even realizes you’re alive or that you’ve been doing things. Emily Dickinson felt this way often; she lived at home and didn’t leave the house much, mostly corresponding with people by letters. However, her invisibility didn’t bother her too much, and that is what this poem is all about. When you feel invisible, you aren’t alone, because someone else is feeling invisible too. Dickinson starts out the poem introducing herself, ”I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (1) Being nobody can mean a lot of things; it could mean she’s no one important, no one special, no one significant, or no one that everyone knows. However, she could also be nobody to many people simply because she doesn’t try to stand out or feel important. She is content just being herself, living her plain, simple life and doing things that make her happy. Being nobody makes her somewhat mysterious; she’s obviously a person, but most people don’t know who she really is. This also relates to the second line in the poem, “Are you – Nobody – too?” (2) Dickinson’s question of the reader seems to show tha t being nobody is something everyone feels at some point in their life. Dickinson calls...
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...province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the nineteenth century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. At the...
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...Still in the Gilded Age There are many things in life that appear attractive on the outside, but turn out to be quite the opposite on the inside. The forgotten fruit that was left to rot on the kitchen counter, the empty promises of a government body, the two-faced colleague at work… there are many of examples of beauty being only skin deep. Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” explores this theme of the gilded side of humanity. Roethke opens “My Papa’s Waltz” through the eyes of a small boy, lending an initial tone of naivety and innocence. This mood is reinforced through his use of rhyme scheme, which adds to the childish effect. However, this feeling is quickly subverted, as a more sinister interpretation can be seen midway through the poem. The boy describes, “The hand that held my wrist/Was battered on one knuckle;/At every step you missed/My right ear scraped a buckle.” (9-13), leading the reader to question what the actual meaning behind this “waltz” is. The minor mentioning of the unhappy mother, as well as the phrase, “But I hung on like death:” (3) is suddenly relevant; it suggests that the father may be an abusive alcoholic, deviating from the prior assumption that he was simply a happy drunk spending time with his son. This shift in reader interpretation can also be attributed to Roethke’s unique word choice. Take for example the word “waltz,” which is used exclusively in the beginning and ending stanzas...
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...Comparison and Contrast Essay between two Poems of Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, or called Emily Dickinson for short (1830 – 1886) and Mary Oliver (1935), are the two poets who contributed great works of art to American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In spite of several characteristics that can be found in both Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver poems, there are undeniably things that distinguish them from one another, although outside both are very famous poets of the poems that they wrote at that time, but actually inside, every poem that they bring the reader has a different meaning and quite deep in reader hearts. For example, as we read the poem “Alligator Poem” by Mary Oliver poem and the poem “A Bird Came down the Walk” by Emily Dickinson, we can clearly see that both poets have borrowed the images of the bird to express the deeply of each verse, and to add lively for their poem. This method is called personification, is one of the main methods by which the poet used to write a poem vividly. Although both poets use personification methods in both poems, such as borrowing the images of the bird to write a poem as an example, but actually the use of such methods have different deeply meaning in the two poems. And that is the topic I write this essay, what are the similarities and differences between how they use images of birds to express their verses? How they have been very successful in using the personification...
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...Holly Pryor 372 After great pain, a formal feeling comes- The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs- The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go round- A wooden way Of ground, or Air, or Ought- Regardless grown, A quartz contentment, like a stone- This is the Hour of Lead- Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons, recollect the Snow- First – Chill- then Stupor- then the letting go I believe Emily Dickenson is talking about the toll that a severe pain, possibly death, and how it makes you feel stiff, restless, and cold. Starting with the nerves you may feel “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs,” explaining how nervous and anxious feelings can arise from pain. She says “The stiff Heart questions,” which can be relatable to how deep, sincere pain can make your heart feel stiff, and sad, and all the many questions you may ask yourself after losing someone close to you. She says “This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As a freezing persons, recollect the Snow-“ touching base with the fact that no matter what, you will always remember this feeling of pain, like a person stuck in the snow will always remember the snow. Next she says “First – chill- then Stupor- then the letting go” , describing, basically, the whole process of losing someone you love. First you feel cold, stiff hearted, hurt, and next you go into a slump of stupor or sadness, and then there comes the part where...
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...the more complex poems that I have read. I do have a slight idea of her meaning of the poem and what the characters mentioned represent. I read the comments made by other people and their interpretations and have a better understanding on the poem. Biography Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson never lived anywhere but Amherst and lived the last years of her life a recluse, writing poetry. After her death, her sister found hundreds of poems Dickinson had written, got them published, and Emily Dickinson's reputation grew from there, making her one of literature's most renowned poets. Although Dickinson is highly deemed as one of the most prominent poets in the field of American literature, during her lifetime she was chiefly known as a gardener rather than as a poet She never married She wore only white dresses for almost her entire adult life Although she was alleged to be a recluse, in reality, she was very much sociable. She frequently entertained guests at her home during her 20s and 30s She wrote nearly 2000 poems, most of which were published posthumously. During her lifetime she published only 7 poems Dickinson never named her poems; the titles were given by the early editors of her...
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...- - - - - - - - - - - - - Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She died in the same place on May 15, 1886. Today people know her as a fascinating, talented writer. Most of the pieces Emily wrote were poems. Emily was a very isolated individual. She rarely ever got out or had any contact with anybody outside of her home. Along with writing her poems she wrote letters to the people that she did have contact with. In the letters that she would write there would be poems somewhere within them. Emily wrote a total of 1,775 poems in her lifetime. Even though she wrote these poems she never let it be known that she had the capability to write poems with such elegance. All of the poems that she would write she kept hidden somewhere in her room. She would hide the poems in places like her window, under her bed, in corners of the room, and lots of other places. After Emily’s death the truth would be told about her secret talent. Emily’s sister, Lavinia Dickinson found around 900 of the poems Emily had hidden in her room. Her sister decided that the poems were good enough to be published. She went to a friend of the family where she would get help in editing and publishing the poems. Lavinia’s friend, Mabel Loomis Todd and a friend of hers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson began to put a lot of Said 2 effort of getting the poems published. In the year 1890 they accomplished in getting 115 of Emily’s poems published. After...
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