My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun By Emily Dickinson

The one time Weslowski uses punctuation is in stanza 2, line 13 (“Tattoos underwater, a guillotine of scarring”) and stanza 5, line 24 (“Clear-cut, neverreplanted”). Placing punctuation in two areas of the overall poem could suggest a break in the narrator’s thoughts, second guessing getting that tattoo because of its everlasting scars or thinking about how lonely they feel, believing or knowing, that they will never fully get over this. The use of no punctuation in the rest of the poem could symbolize the run on thoughts that are happening in whoever’s mind is speaking. Generally when something is traumatic or distressing, one’s mind can travel to several places. Not using periods, commas or even an ellipsis can signify the narrator’s whirlwind of a mind. This could be explaining that one never really stop thinking and that all of their thoughts are just as jumbled as they are. Another reason for creating the poem like this might be that Weslowski intended his audience to read the poem in a softer manner. Exclamation points are put in sentence to show excitement, parenthesis are used to show dialogue, but the author of this poem could have intended it to be read as a quieter piece. He might have placed nothing there so the reader would read it as if it was their own experience and how their own mind and thoughts would be during the

    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.

The lines are enjambed with phrases stopping in the middle of new lines and lines spilling into other lines. The lines do not pause to acknowledge the end of sentences like people seldom pause their daily lives to acknowledge the suffering of those around them. Auden also uses bad syntax in the last line of the poem, "had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Auden may have chosen to write in this free form to demonstrate that people are so indifferent to what is going on around them that it does not make any difference what form the poem is written in, as it will only be overlooked and not given any attention. The form of the poem allows the reader to consider the ways in which suffering is masked by the frenzy of everyday life and that even the acknowledged suffering of others does not seem to be of any concern to anybody but the sufferer.

The capitalized words are the key words of the poem. They add weight to the lines, tipping the balance of the poetic rhythm. The reader is invited to ponder over their meaning and significance (Miller 59). The capitalization gives Dickinson’s poems concreteness and symbolism (Miller 58). The reader’s attention is drawn to these capitalized words. They form an image in the reader’s mind. For example, in the first example, the capitalized words are Slant, Winter, Afternoons, Heft, Cathedral, and Tunes. These words alone evoke the image of a cold and lonely day which burdens the heart like the heavy and mournful tones of an organ. Just words “Winter Afternoons” carry sensations of frigidness, bleakness, and loneliness. “Winter Afternoons” set the scene and describe the mood (Porter 141). The words “Ethereal Blow” strike the reader as an oxymoron. Ethereal implies something light, delicate, and

Dickinson starts the first stanza of the poem with, “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me” (807). Clearly she was not ready to go, death simply took her by surprise and brought her busy life to a halt. This could be seen as a beautiful way to take on death because death is usually said in such a morbid tone and the fact she associated “kindly” with death makes it beautiful. The second line says, “The Carriage held but just Ourselves – and Immortality” (Dickinson 807). The author emphasizes Carriage, Ourselves, and Immortality. Dickinson seems to be talking about her own death chariot and by immortality, she believes her death is not the end, but rather as a step to eternal life.

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.

what the author wants to imply past the surface level of the work. In Emily Dickinson’s poem

As said previously, women in this time period had very limited ways of doing this. However, Emily had something that not many people had the luxury of claiming; she could write. She became a fantastic writer the minute she could create structured sentences. The ability to attain the power she was looking for was already found. Emily had the special ability of being able to arrange words as if they are puzzle pieces whose only purpose is to create an overall picture or concept. An example of this is when she described hope in the form of a bird as it relates to human nature (“’Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers” 123). She also once used a carriage ride to metaphorize the circle of life, immortality, and death (“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” 26). As previously stated, Emily’s power is displayed through her use of diction. Power itself is commonly associated with money or fame. However, money and fame do not equal power. As a young child, Emily comes to this realization along with knowing that her ability to possess an astounding use of diction and metaphors could get her exactly what she desired-powerful authority. However, metaphors and use of diction were not the only two characteristics of writing Emily chose to focus on. She also seemed to choose her themes very carefully. Dickinson repeatedly put a spotlight on thematic things such as death, loss, solitude, authority,

Emily Dickinson was a poet who used many different devices to develop her poetry, which made her style quite unique. A glance at one of her poems may lead one to believe that she was quite a simple poet, although a closer examination of her verse would uncover the complexity it contains.

First, she uses dashes that separate the lines in the poem. The dashes are there to cause readers to pause and slowly read the poem. The next method that is used is the rhyme scheme, which is an ABCB pattern. The rhyme scheme is very important in the fact that it still slows the reading of the poem down, while still flowing smoothly. Also, Dickinson uses strange capitalization throughout the poem. The capitalization is purposely in specific words to make readers stop and think about why the words are capitalized, making the readers slow down while

In Emily Dickinson’s “Remorse is memory awake”, Dickinson uses a great deal of hyphens. For instance she states” Remorse is cureless,- the disease” (Dickinson 46). In this instance, and in most instances, she uses the hyphen to create a bigger pause than that of a comma. In this way Dickinson uses hyphens to create rhythm in her poetry. Without hyphens the reader wouldn’t know which pauses she intended to be longer than others.

Dickinson’s poems are easily recognized by her usage of dashes, random capitalization, and no titles. Dickinson frequently uses dashes for a more dramatic tone and adding more power behind her words. For example, in the poem “Death sets a Thing significant,” Dickinson writers, “The stitches stopped -- by themselves –” (XX). In this sentence, the dashes between the words “by themselves” it forces the reader to pause and add a more dramatic tone. It also shows that she tries to add emphasis that nothing influenced the stitches stop it just stopped by itself. In most of her poems she places dashes at the end instead of common punctuation marks in most poet’s poems during her time. For instance, in the poem “ I gave myself to him” the line “ Depreciate the Vision-/ Till the Merchant buys-” demonstrates her usage of dashes to replace the common punctuations ( stanza 3, line 1-2). In addition, she would capitalize words that shouldn’t be capitalized. For instance, in the poem “ I gave myself to him” she wrote “ And took Himself, for Pay,” (Stanza 1,line 2). In this line, the capitalization of himself emphasizes that he didn’t give anything up for this marriage and that she gave up everything in her life. It also emphasizes the inequality in her marriage and society’s view of roles for females as submissive. As a matter of fact, this is also shown in the line “ She rose to His Requirement” from the poem “She Rose to His Requirement- dropt” ( stanza 1, line 1). As in this sentence by capitalizing His she made it seem like he was a higher status than her. During that time, Mount Holyoke Female semistery college adapted these techniques and it led to many believing that she adapted these trademarks because she wanted wanted to gain admission. ( “Major”) Also, Emily Dickinson never title any of her poems. Due to the fact that she never had any intention of publishing her work while she was alive, her work was only published after her death by her family (“Emily”). Dickinson’s poems are mostly filled with metaphors, imagery Almost all of her poems are lyrical which express thoughts and feelings and written in first person point of view ( “Major”). She chose to wrote her poem in a lyrical form and a first person view

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

Emily Dickinson was one of the many famous American poets whose work was published in the 19th century. Her writing style was seen as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was later edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to give emphasis to certain lines and subjects to get her point across. Even though Emily Dickinson was thought to be a recluse, she wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her poems.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most interesting female poets of the nineteenth century. Every author has unique characteristics about him/her that make one poet different from another, but what cause Emily Dickinson to be so unique are not only the words she writes, but how she writes them. Her style of writing is in a category of its own. To understand how and why she writes the way she does, her background has to be brought into perspective. Every poet has inspiration, negative or positive, that contributes not only to the content of the writing itself, but the actual form of writing the author uses to express his/her personal talents. Emily Dickinson is no different. Her childhood and adult experiences and culture form