Bila Lee
English 48B
March 19, 2009
Journal #21 Emily Dickinson I
Quote
“I felt a funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through - … (Dickinson 84).
Summary
It is excerpted from poem No. 340 found in “The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (1999).” Unlike our previous assigned poet, Walt Whitman, Dickinson is more like a traditional poet in the sense that her poems are rather short in length, have a focusing theme and retain some poetry features like rhymes and structure. It is observed that Dickinson often pessimistically expresses her sadness and desperate in her poems – like in No. 340 she uses dictions such as “funeral” and “Mourners” which implies her thought of death – yet since none of her poems has a proper title, thus it is difficult for critics to literarily analyze them in depth.
Responses
Emily Dickinson had suffered a period of emotional crisis. As shown in Answers.com, “Between 1858 and 1866 Dickinson wrote more than 1100 poems, full of aphorisms, paradoxes, off rhymes, and eccentric grammar. Few are more than 16 lines long, composed in meters based on English hymnology. The major subjects are love and separation, death, nature, and God - but especially love” (Answers). It is believed that this emotional crisis changes both the social life and literary life of Emily Dickinson. On one hand, she shuts herself in her bedroom for many years and does not expose to the reality, and hence her perspectives are narrow and subjectively negative; on the other hand, as already suggested in my outside source, the themes of her poems surround love and separation, so I further believe her prolonged depressed is driven by a failure in romantic relationship.
It is significant to note that her best friend Susan Gilbert married to her brother Austin in 1856, just two years before her literary turning point. Some scholars argue the sudden psychological change of Emily Dickinson is due to the marriage between her best friend and her brother, in which Emily is literally a homosexual who is hurt of losing her love. In fact, Dickinson expresses her depression, sadness and hatred in most of her poems, and most dictions she uses are extremely negative like “pain” in No. 225, “lost” in No. 39 and the entire poem I pick for this journal serves to express her grief. In the first stanza, she tells “I felt like a Funeral, in my Brain” (Dickinson 84) which implies she is not motivated to live, to socialize and to expose herself to the external world – she just wants to passively terminate her brain activity from thinking too much – we can obviously realize her miserable life from her word choices.
In fact, most artists express their emotional fluctuations in their artwork. Painters may paint some abstract pictures when they feel blue; musicians may compose plain songs to express their sadness or compose some energetic songs when they feel great; photographers may take dark pictures to express their pessimist. And for poets, take Emily Dickinson as an example, we can address her darkness and emotional crisis from her poems, and honestly I feel sorrow for her when I read her poems 150 years after her work.
English 48B
March 19, 2009
Journal #21 Emily Dickinson I
Quote
“I felt a funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through - … (Dickinson 84).
Summary
It is excerpted from poem No. 340 found in “The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (1999).” Unlike our previous assigned poet, Walt Whitman, Dickinson is more like a traditional poet in the sense that her poems are rather short in length, have a focusing theme and retain some poetry features like rhymes and structure. It is observed that Dickinson often pessimistically expresses her sadness and desperate in her poems – like in No. 340 she uses dictions such as “funeral” and “Mourners” which implies her thought of death – yet since none of her poems has a proper title, thus it is difficult for critics to literarily analyze them in depth.Responses
Emily Dickinson had suffered a period of emotional crisis. As shown in Answers.com, “Between 1858 and 1866 Dickinson wrote more than 1100 poems, full of aphorisms, paradoxes, off rhymes, and eccentric grammar. Few are more than 16 lines long, composed in meters based on English hymnology. The major subjects are love and separation, death, nature, and God - but especially love” (Answers). It is believed that this emotional crisis changes both the social life and literary life of Emily Dickinson. On one hand, she shuts herself in her bedroom for many years and does not expose to the reality, and hence her perspectives are narrow and subjectively negative; on the other hand, as already suggested in my outside source, the themes of her poems surround love and separation, so I further believe her prolonged depressed is driven by a failure in romantic relationship.It is significant to note that her best friend Susan Gilbert married to her brother Austin in 1856, just two years before her literary turning point. Some scholars argue the sudden psychological change of Emily Dickinson is due to the marriage between her best friend and her brother, in which Emily is literally a homosexual who is hurt of losing her love. In fact, Dickinson expresses her depression, sadness and hatred in most of her poems, and most dictions she uses are extremely negative like “pain” in No. 225, “lost” in No. 39 and the entire poem I pick for this journal serves to express her grief. In the first stanza, she tells “I felt like a Funeral, in my Brain” (Dickinson 84) which implies she is not motivated to live, to socialize and to expose herself to the external world – she just wants to passively terminate her brain activity from thinking too much – we can obviously realize her miserable life from her word choices.
In fact, most artists express their emotional fluctuations in their artwork. Painters may paint some abstract pictures when they feel blue; musicians may compose plain songs to express their sadness or compose some energetic songs when they feel great; photographers may take dark pictures to express their pessimist. And for poets, take Emily Dickinson as an example, we can address her darkness and emotional crisis from her poems, and honestly I feel sorrow for her when I read her poems 150 years after her work.
20/20 But there is great Joy in her poems as well!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful it's incredible
ReplyDelete