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Friday, January 18, 2013
Dickinson Blog #2
Read and annotate poems:
95 ("The Soul selects her own society)
11 ("Success is counted sweetest")
122 ("After a great pain, a formal feeling comes")
and 274 ("One need not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted").
Then write 2 blog posts, one each for two of those poems. For each post, do what we have practiced: identify key metaphors, key words, points of confusion, and links to other poems or books we've read. But you also need to respond to another post on that poem. This means that if you're the first to post about this poem, you catch a break.
Put your poem number at the top of each post, and post your writing in reply to a post on the same poem. This way we have separate threads for each poem.
If it looks like you spent half an hour writing your two blog posts, you get full credit. Posts are due by 8 am Wednesday.
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95
ReplyDeleteIn poem 95, Dickinson uses words like "divine", "society", "chariots", and "emperor". I think the metaphor is the soul is like the ruler of it's own kingdom, with unlimited power to make it's own decisions. Another phrase that depicts this metaphor is, "an Emperor be kneeling upon her mat". This poem is different from Dickinson's others in that it seems pretty positive, and not really about death at all. I'm confused about who I is in the last stanza. She says, "I've known her". I think the her is referring to the soul, or king/queen, but I seems like someone the soul used to know or pay attention to.
11
Poem 11, like poem 95, seems happy compared to Dickinson's other poems; until the last stanza. The main character in this poem is success itself, which is kind of confusing since it isn't an actual person. I'm not really sure what success is representing in this poem. In the second stanza, success represents a soldier achieving a victory. Even though this soldier knows what it's like to have victories, they also know what it's like to be defeated. In the last stanza, Dickinson brings up death again when talking about defeat. Some interesting words in this poem are, "nectar", "purple Host", "ear", and "strains".
11
ReplyDeleteI like Lily's confusion on the soldier with success. It brings up my point that I believe the metaphor is using a war or bloody battle where victory is achieved but many soldiers died. This means success or winning is not always the happy ending that people want. "Success is counted sweetness by those who never succeed." This quote shows that a person does not know success until sacrifice and the downs and ups of succeeding. The "distant strains of triumph burst agonized" are the dying soldiers left dying after the victory. This shows my idea of sacrifice for successThis is a depressing poem showing dickinson's discontent with the definition of success and what comes with it. No person who was not lost and sacrificed and experienced any hardship has every really experienced success in Dickinson's poem.
274
In poem 274, i found the key words to be , safer, lonesome, and horror idea words like spectre, haunted, ghost. The metaphor is comparing a house or chamber which is the outside world to an endless ever expanding corridor which is the mind. I think the main idea of this poem is Dickinson writing about how scary the endlessness of thoughts in her head and everyones head is. In real life there is an end to about everything but in your head there isnt. This is what scares Dickinson and that is why she uses the horror words associated with the real fear of an "endless corridor". The fear that people have in the outside world is nothing to what is experienced in your own head. The scariest thoughts of anything from vast expansiveness or monsters all originate from the mind.
274
DeleteI agree with Chris, in which it seems he deeply analyzed this poem, he really did. It is a very scary thing when there appears to a balance or maybe even an internal struggle between the outside world (society) and the inside world (you, your mind). Chris you touch on this line throughout your writing: Ourself behind ourself, concealed-should startle most. The fear in this line is “startling,” makes one really believe that he or she is their own greatest enemy, that we should truly be afraid of the glory dwells within the very pits of our souls. That somehow the path that lies within us are far greater than what lies ahead of us is a fascinating concept. The word that stuck out to me were “chamber” and “house” because in class we’ve talked about the theme of our house, the way we view the word and our ways of cutting the world off with our “doors” and “walls.” And even the word “corridors,” which is interesting because in that stanza it appears that Dickinson is writing about the potential that humans possess, she wrote “The Brain has Corridors-surpassing Material Place.” Possibly Dickinson is giving the human race, even in the midst of one of the fiercest battles in American History, the Civil War, the benefit of the doubt. By this I mean she knows that somewhere within us we have the power to choose over materialism, we have the initial good to conquer the evilness of greed. What I am confused about is when she begins to talk about things that are “far safer,” such as Midnight Meeting or Abbey Gallop, these things seem far safer but why. And Dickinson also mentions the external ghost which I presume has a connection to the external world, but what is the importance behind the “External Ghost” and the “Cooler Host?” The metaphor for this poem would a house, a closed off place.
122
In this poem I think that I got in full the essence of Emily Dickinson. We know that she writes about death and death is very well the themes of majority of her poems but here in this poem she writes about death in such a “step by step” way if you will. One would probably think how ironic is that Dickinson compares death to tombs but it’s not ironic, it’s a great comparison that speaks of the stiffness of death. I think the words: sit, tombs, stiff, mechanical, wooden, stone, freezing, and chill. These words deem to be important because they contribute to the physical definition of death; they describe closely what death is. I believe what is also confusing are the last lines when Dickinson mentions “First-chill-then Stupor-then the letting go-” which seems to be in the wrong order because she seems to be describing illness when she says “stupor”. The illness should come first and then the chill, but why is it the chill comes before the illness. Dickinson could be implying that we’re dead before we reach six feet under. We don’t need an illness to sicken us; we’re already sickened by the discords within ourselves that reflect the discords of our society.
11
DeleteSuccess does not come easy. A person has to fight for it and often has to sacrifice.Chris helped me realize that Dickinson uses a battle to help explain this. In the first stanza, she explains that a person can only feel the “sweetness” of success if he or she has never gotten a taste for it; someone that has suffered a lot in their lives. In the second and third stanza, she talks about the battle. Even though some one has won , or “took the Flag today”, it is hard to tell who is the clear victor. I agree with Chris when he talks about the dying soldiers. These soldiers are a metaphor for someone sacrificing or going through pain. These soldiers have fought the battle and have won, yet they have died.
122
DeleteIn this poem, Dickinson is talking about after “such great pain”, humans slowly die. I agree with Donnell when he says that the poem takes the reader on a journey of the slow death of this person. Dickinson is trying to explain that once a human is in despair and they know they will die, the process is easy. She says death is a “formal feeling” like humans endure no pain and like he or she has been their before. The middle stanza is a bit confusing to me. It is hard to understand what they are talking about. The last stanza explains the process of ‘letting go’, or what present day humans say “walking into the light”. She compares this to the feeling of a person venturing off into the snow. She explains that humans get used to the feeling and eventually start to lose feeling.