Fight For Agency By Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

Dickinson’s poem unfolds truth to society’s power over a woman’s identity. The poem has an angry tone read from the first line, “I’m ceded- I’ve stopped being Their’s-” (1). A defiant and condemning voice aimed at an ambiguous, authoritative figure who is embodied by the capitalized, plural pronoun “Their.” Dickinson’s refusal to exactly specify who “Their” is, demonstrates the power and relationship “Their” has over the speaker. Dickinson interchanges this pronoun with “They” (2) as the poem progresses on, and this larger entity is associated as the church, family, society, etc. because of Dickinson’s references to “church” (3) and “childhood” (6) within the opening stanza. Dickinson’s narrator is tired of being put aside or controlled by others. This angry tone begins to grow louder as Dickinson beings conveying this message and while the poem moves through stanzas uncovering the narrator’s identity.

In “They Shut Me Up in Prose,” Dickinson discusses how women are confined in society’s structured roles on women in the Victorian era. Dickinson does so in three stanzas, with an inconsistent rhyme scheme. This poem is influenced by the inequalities between genders and the limitations that prevented women from enjoying things that were seen as specifically for men, such as writing poems and having a higher education. In it, she uses various literary and poetic elements.

Emily Dickinson is a poet known for her cryptic, confusing language. Words are often put together in an unusual way and create deciphering difficulties for the reader. But behind all the confusion is a hidden meaning that becomes clear, and one realizes that all the odd word choices were chosen for a specific reason. The poem I will try to analyze is My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun, or number 754. I find this to be one of her most difficult poems to decode. However, I find the images fascinating and the last stanza very confusing but intriguing. What I first thought the poem was about and what I finally came to a conclusion on are two completely different thoughts. Through answering

In the beginning of Emily Dickinson’s poem “754,” the narrator immediately compares her life to a weapon, “My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --” (754). Usually, when one thinks of a gun, he or she might think of death instead of love. In most cases, when a person owns or has a possession of a gun, that person might use the gun for protection. A gun is an inanimate object that has the potential or power to take the life of a human. From analyzing the poem “754,” the narrator symbolizes a loaded gun, full of potential, full of power, waiting to be in the possession of its owner for protection just as a bride waits to be wedded by her husband.

In the poem 764 of The Norton Anthology which starts "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -" (line 1), Emily Dickinson takes on the role of a married woman of the nineteenth century whose husband owns and completely controls her. The woman, whose voice Dickinson wrote from, reflects on the importance of her husband 's life to hers and her dependency on him being there to direct her life. Dickinson never married and lived a secluded life in her family 's home, only ever leaving the house for one year before returning again. Though she did not marry, the traditional roles of women still restricted her to live in the home of her family and under the ruler ship of her father like the rest of the women in the house. Some of her close friends and

The first poem that I would like to examine is Because I could not stop for death by Emily Dickinson. This poem is about someone being dead, but no one knows that until the very end of this poem. The poem in the beginning states that a gentleman has come for the speaker, and the speaker states that she can not stop for death, she does not want to die but realizes that is naturally happens to all human beings. So the gentleman wants to take her on a ride on his horse carriage. The speaker does go along on the ride, and is very calm and easy going in the beginning of the poem. She stays positive while looking at the view of children playing at recess which makes her remember her own childhood. The only reason she is staying so positive is due to the fact she does not realize where they are headed. While on their journey she sees the setting sun, which actually means mature years getting older and heading toward the end of life. When the speaker talks about being “dews drew quivering and chill” so it may be morning, she is also cold because the only thing she is wearing is a gown. “We pasued before a House that seemed A swelling of the ground- The Roof was scarcely visible-The Cornice-in the Ground.” This stanza basically says that the speaker has met her new home which turns out to be a grave. The swelling ground, a roof that is hard to see mean the top of the casket. That is when it hits the speaker that she is buried there, she also comes to the conclusion that she has

The post civil war era was wrought with sexism and backwards thinking. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830, wrote 1800 poems in her lifetime. She has become known for unfolding the social boundaries surrounding women in this time period. Most of her life was shrouded in seclusion and mystery. In the realm of poetry, authors are creative with their usage of literary techniques in order to illustrate their point of view to the reader. Emily Dickinson is especially known for her precise diction, powerful imagery, and obscure timing or rhythm. In her poem “My life had stood – A loaded Gun,” she is heavily dependant on the use of images, eloquent diction and tone to convey both the literal and symbolic meaning or themes to

This poem by Dickinson, at first, struck me as peculiar, and it took me a second reading to figure out why. The poem’s first two lines though seeming straightforward have an interesting use of punctuation, word choice, and structure. These features lead to a hidden Truth and a political critique.

Emily Dickinson emphasizes and handles the line in a way so that the reader can understand where she’s coming from. The poem is divided up into two quatrains and consists of end-stopped lines, caesura, and enjambments. The reader can note that the first three lines and the sixth line are the only enjambments within the poem because they all run over to the next line without a pause. There are three caesuras present within the poem and are seen in lines two, five, and eight. These caesuras are significant because not only do they serve as a pause within a line, they add to the sensation and change in tone throughout the poem to really stress the importance of the themes of “Despair and “Fear.” Both of these words give the reader an idea of what

Prominent poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson share a preoccupation with spirituality, freedom, and death, which characterizes many of their works. In the poems ‘A Woman Waits for Me’ by Whitman and ‘Title divine, is mine’ by Dickinson, they use a similar approach to these shared subjects. However, they tackle their respective poems from differing positions of social power, which places them in opposition to each other. Though both poets conceptualize spiritual union through earthly union, marriage and intercourse respectively, Whitman relies on patriarchal norms to legitimize his argument while Dickinson subverts them by claiming power for herself.

In Emily dickesons poem "hope is a thing with feathers! She established the message of hope by applying main ideas. For example on line five Dickenson uses unique text to make the image of sweetest and gale by indicating what hope is, " And sweetest-in the gale-is heard-" (l.5). Emily Dickenson uses sweetest because she's telling us that the tune of the bird sings is "sweetest". Gale is a strong wind that you could hear and see it. Dickenson utilizes images from nature. "Hope" is the thing with feathers". In terms of Dickensons life. What Dickenson is telling us about this poem is that inside it is peaceful and secure, while outside is dangerous. Dickinson is reminding us of hopes power. It us always there and is strong enough to see us through

The poem evinces its deeper meaning in the context of Dickinson’s life – she rarely left her room and almost never interacted with people other than her family members. In her lifetime, she was “nobody” to

Stephen Bonnycastle writes on the development of gender norms, “Most girls growing up in North American Society are encouraged to repress their masculine traits and develop those that show them to be ‘attractively female’” (191). Similarly, there are social expectations for someone to be married. The view that is established for what the normal person looks like includes someone who is married. In the poem “I’m ‘wife’- I’ve finished that” by Emily Dickinson, the idea that marriage is an ideal is challenged through her punctuation and her tone at the beginning and end of the poem and is also upheld through portrayal of marriage and comparison between the married and single life.

During the late 1800s in America, women began to seek rights further than marriage and motherhood. In contrast to traditional gender roles, many women attempted to individualize from their families in search of independence and identity. Dickinson remained unwed throughout her entire life, which was rare in the Victorian era. Although Dickinson seldom addressed political and social issues in her poetry, it can be interpreted that the poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” uses death as a symbol for marriage. This relates her isolation from society to the progressive women who opposed custom expectations of unity and dependence in the late nineteenth century.