Sunrise in Amherst

The Features of Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Speaker:吴倩

Here’s a short list of indicating frequency of Emily Dickinson’s used favorite words in her 1775 poems:

170: sun 141: death, face 130: god, time 125: soul 124: heart 121: night

106: love 102: bird 94: die 88: eyes 86: bee, home 82: light 77: sky

Subject matters

Death and Immortality

Nature

Love

Religion

Success and Failure

Unity of Goodness, Truth and Beauty

Other Subjects

•Death and immortality are the center of Dickinson’s poems (one third).

•She expects to understand the meaning of life by understanding the meaning of death.

•“I Heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”•“Because I could not stop for Death”•“My life closed twice before its close”

She was skeptical and ambivalent about the possibility of achieving immortality.

I heard a Fly buzz– when I died—

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air—

Between the Heaves of Storm—

The Eyes around– had wrung them dry—

And breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset—when the King

Be witnessed—in the Room—

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable—and then it was

There interposed a Fly—

With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—

And then the Windows failed—and then

I could not see to see—

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If immortality unveil

A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice fell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

Dickinson’s many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur often in the Amherst of the time added to her gloomy meditation. “My life closed twice before its close” portrays the poet as ever-ready for the assault of death.

Nature

• Natural phenomena, changes of seasons, heavenly bodies, animals, birds and insects, flowers of various kinds—all these and many other subjects related to nature find their way into her poetry.

• The mixed feelings of joy and grief at the coming of spring and autumn, the sense of momentary transitoriness(短暂，瞬间 ) and the power and majesty of summer storm.

• In the meantime the cold indifference of nature is also revealed in her poems.

Dickinson was original. The way she wrote about love is a good case in point.

“Mine—by the Right of the White Election” expresses a passionate and eternal love in an elegiac ( 悲伤的 )tone.

“Wild Nights—Wild Nights”, Love is expressed in an unabashed manner with evident erotic image.

Charles Wadsworth

•Dickinson holds that beauty, truth and goodness are ultimately one.

•John Keats—

“beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all

Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”

•“I died for Beauty—but was scarce”

•Strong influence of Calvinism on her thought (pessimism and tragic tone of her poems);

•exploring human’s inner world (psychology description in her poems);

•Her poems abounds in telling original images;

•Good at catching the charm of something but dropping the thing itself;

•Severe economy of expression;

•Brief, direct and plain language

We passed the School, where Children stroveAt Recess—in the Ring—We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—We passed the Setting Sun—

We passed the school where children playedTheir lessons scarcely done;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.

Here are two versions of one stanza of one of her poems. The first is unedited; the second has been “corrected.”

• Overuse of capitalization & dashes( 破折号 );• The use of deletions;• Absence of connective words;• Irregular rhymes;• Wrenched grammar & syntax; e.g. "A Wonderful—to Feel the Sun."

Characteristics of Poetic Forms

Rhetorical Devices

Oxymoron （矛盾修饰法）

Synesthesia (联觉）

Alliteration(头韵)，vowel rhyme（叠韵）

Metaphor

PersonificationDeath is a Dialogue between

The Spirit and the Dust.

“Dissolve” says Death—The Spirit “Sir

I have another Trust”—

Capitalization of Her Poems• German, a language Dickinson knew, typically

capitalizes nouns. • Capitalized words gives additional emphasis.• Some critics (Habegger) believe that her use is

at times idiosyncratic and more random than meaningful, since in some instances a word is capitalized in one of Dickinson's handwritten copies of a poem but not in another of her copies.

•marks to guide readers on how the passage should be read or phrased;•To makes readers ponder words and phrases;•To cause reflection and intensity;•To slow reader or call attention.

The Use of Dashes

I Like to See It Lap the Miles

I like to see it lap the Miles—

And lick the Valleys up—

And stop to feed itself at tanks—

And then—prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains—

And supercilious peer

In Shanties—by the sides of Roads—

And then a Quarry pare

To fit it’s sides

And crawl between

Complainig all the while

In horrid—hooting stanza—

Then—chase itself down Hill—

And neigh like Boanerges—

Then—prompter than a Star

Stop—docile and omnipotent

At it’s own stable door—

She tells about the railway is as impressive as her striking image of a galloping horse intended as a symbol both of the railroad and developing America.