Analysis of Emily Dickinson's The Bustle in a House
The Bustle in a House is a poem by Emily Dickinson about the painful loss one feels after the death of a loved one. Dickinson was quite familiar with the kind of pain expressed in her poem. Her father, mother, nephew, and three close friends, all died within an eight-year period. It is no small wonder that a common theme in Dickinson s poetry is death. She uses many literary devices, including structure, imagery, figurative language, sound devices, and capitalization; to convey the hurt one experiences when a loved one passes on.
The structure of The Bustle in a House is very interesting. It is a short poem, only two stanzas long. Both stanzas are made up of a single
…show more content…
One usually thinks of the morning as a quiet time, especially when someone has died. But the word bustle gives a sense of loud noise and busyness. In the second stanza, the survivors are found .... Sweeping up the Heart/And putting Love away. One can almost picture relatives and friends cleaning up after their hearts and folding their love up like menial objects.
Figurative language plays a key role in the poem, as well. The best example is The Morning after Death, which sounds a lot like mourning after death. In fact, mourning could even replace morning and the poem would still make sense. Another example occurs in the second stanza, when Dickinson uses the words sweeping and putting. By using such cold, unfeeling words when describing matters of the heart, the author creates a numb, distant tone. She really means that after someone dies, one almost has to detach oneself from the feelings of love that once existed for the deceased.
Sound devices are another type of literary device that Dickinson makes use of throughout the poem. Examples of consonance include, Bustle in a House, solemnest of industries, and not want to use again/ until Eternity. The s sound in bustle, house, solemnest, and industries sounds like the whispers of people talking but trying to be quiet. The t sound in not, want, to, until, and eternity gives the last few lines a sense of finality, like the finality in death. There is also an example of
“Afraid! Of whom am I afraid? Not Death – for who is He?” (F345). Dickinson, on the other hand, was not shaken by the thought of death, but rather welcomed it. Dickinson’s poetry not only portrayed death as nothing to fear, but it also counterbalanced society’s disdain for death. In one of Dickinson’s most popular poems, she writes “Because I could not stop for death- he kindly stopped for me” (F479). Culture typically sees death as an unwelcome end that everyone must face, but her poetry depicts death as being kind enough to halt its progress to accommodate her. Why is Emily Dickinson’s poetry so in love with death? Death is the only reliable constant (Ottlinger, 42). “All but Death, Can be adjusted Dynasties repaired – Systems – settled in the Sockets – Citadels – dissolved – Wastes of Lives – resown with Colors By Succeeding Springs – Death – unto itself – Exception – is exempt from Change -” (F789). Perhaps the harshest aspect of her poetry’s death is that after it has taken another soul, life moves on simply
One of the prevalent themes of Emily’s work is death. Since she wrote about her inner world and troubles, death as a theme could not be avoided. Emily Dickinson had to face the losing friends to death. Several deaths of family members, including her mother, father and a nephew helped contribute to the theme in her poetry. These events affected her health but she found a way to cope with the idea of death with her poetry. She developed an attitude towards death, seeing it as a transition from mortality to immortality. She accepted its inevitability and tried to make
The last two lines of the poem are a timid reflection on what might happen “Had I the Art to stun myself/ With Bolts—of Melody!” (23-24). The idea that creation is a power that can get loose and injure even the creator illuminates why in this poem the artist positions herself firmly as a mere spectator. In these first two poems, we meet a Dickinson who is not entirely familiar to us—even though we are accustomed to her strong desire for privacy, these poems can be startling in the way they reveal the intensity of Dickinson’s fears. She is, after all, shrinking from what is dearest to her—nature, one of her favorite subjects, becomes a harsh judge, and poetry, her favored medium of communication, can suddenly render the reader “impotent” and the writer “stun[ned]” (19, 23). The extremity of her positions in shrinking from the small and beautiful things she loves creates the sense that this is just the beginning of a journey by leaving so much room for change.
Dickinson used many sound elements in her well known poem “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died”. One example would be slant rhyme which is a type of rhyme formed by words with similar, but not identical sounds. This helps shape the poem’s meaning because the poem flows together
what the author wants to imply past the surface level of the work. In Emily Dickinson’s poem
This poem is written in ballad form which is odd because one would think of a ballad and think a love story or an author gushing on about nature not an allegory about personified Death. Dickinson both unites and contrasts love/courtship with death, experimenting with both reader’s expectations and the poetic convention dictating specific poem form. This is why Dickinson is widely hailed because of her unconventional writing methods.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American History, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice.
In the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson uses symbolism to convey some sort of mental funeral that the speaker is experiencing. The funeral image that Dickinson depicts in the first line of the poem: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” does not literally represent a funeral, but it is used to symbolism a mental breakdown and agony that the speaker is going through. By using this symbolism, the speaker is imagining the death of old ways of thought. Dickinson writes that when the funeral service was “like a Drum—“ (Dickinson 43) and that it “Kept beating—beating—till I thought My Mind was going numb—“ (43), leaving readers believing that the speaker is going mad. By depicting this image, Dickinson reveals that with the death of old thought; there is some sort of numbness or pain that is necessary to “progress to a better state” (Goldfarb 2). By repeating the beating sound two times, along with the rhyming sequence in the previous lines of the poem, Dickinson is stressing the numbness and the importance of it.
Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than
Two of Dickinson’s universal techniques are metaphor and the fresh application of language; both techniques result in powerful images, and can be seen in two of her poems that focus on nature themes, “ A Bird came down the Walk” and “narrow Fellow.” She closes the poem, “ A Bird” with a stanza equating flight through the air with movement through water,
Dickinson talks about the house were the family member lays dying in like it is unfair that people will continue to live in it. She shows a brief sign of being angry that people will continue to dwell in the same place that her loved one has passed away in. “As we went out and in/ Between Her final Room/ And Rooms where Those to be alive/ Tomorrow were, a Blame” (lines 9,10,11,12) It makes the house seem more like a simple passage way only used for entering and exits. It takes the idea of it actually being someone’s home away from the poem. The reader starts to see
Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, 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. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense
Dickinson writes “I heard a fly buzz when I died”, implying that the speaker’s experience is being told from the grave (1). Which is why it makes sense that Dickinson also writes “The eyes beside had wrung them dry”(5) and “I willed my keepsakes, signed away/ What portion of me I/ Could make assignable” (9-11), to both allude that the speaker is in his/her deathbed and the people around are crying and that the speaker has already signed his/her will. Dickinson also uses imagery, when she writes: “The stillness round my form/ Was like the stillness in the air/ Between the heaves of storm”(2-4). This is both an example of a paradox and a way to set the scene. The lines are a paradox because the air can’t be very still, if there is a storm, thus creating an almost chaotic scene. Dickinson also uses imagery in: “The windows failed, and then I could not see to see”, the windows representing the speaker’s eyes and therefore alluding to the death of the speaker
American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate Norman Cousins once said: “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” In other words, this quote means that people within a society are very pessimistic about their daily occurrences with fearing the pain of death. The subject of death, including Emily Dickinson’s own death, occurs throughout her poems and letters. Although some find the preoccupation morbid, hers was not an unusual mindset for a time and place where religious attention focused on being prepared to die and where people died of illness and accident more readily than they do today. Nor was it an unusual concern for a sensitive young woman who lived fifteen years of her youth next door to the town cemetery. Even though many find it strange, Emily Dickinson had a healthy and genuine relationship with death and mortality.
This poem, written by Emily Dickinson, is a poem about death and his apparent kindness. Emily Dickinson is a 19th Century American poet who has had a great impact on poetry. Though she lived in solitude for a majority of her life, the people she did come into contact with had great influence on her(“Emily Dickinson”). She was influenced a great deal by the concept of death and the book of Revelations (“Emily Dickinson”). This poem was originally published in 1863, and has been open to questions and speculations regarding the intent of the speaker of the poem. I chose this poem to write on because Emily Dickinson has always been a favorite poet of mine, and her whimsical outlook on some of the most pressing matters, such as death, intrigues me.