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Poetry Analysis of Emily Dickinson Essay

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Analysis of Emily Dickinson's "The snake", "In the Garden", and "It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon—."

Emily Dickinson uses nature in almost all of her poetry. She uses many literary techniques in her poems to show her interpretations of nature and the world around her. In the poem "The snake" she uses imagery in the forms sight and touch. The poem describes the snake as transient or passing swiftly and deceptive or misleading. His appearance is sudden. As the snake moves it divides the grass in one place, and as he moves, in another. The speaker has been deluded by the snake's appearance. It mistakes the snake for a whip or lash. This is a use of situational irony.

Emily also uses personification to give the snake human …show more content…

When saying, "zero at the bone" she is saying how the feeling penetrates to "the bone" and suggests how deeply felt, and how intense the emotion is. By using these connotation at the end of her poem she could be referring to death or dying, maybe from fear of the snake. This poem uses many symbols, and specific word choice to show how danger may reveal itself in nature. After reading the poem the tone can be seen as frightening or depressing because Emily takes the beauty of nature and shows that there are sides to it that can be threatening and dangerous as well.

In another poem by Emily Dickinson entitled "In the Garden" she also uses lots of imagery about nature. She uses sight and sound imagery to give the reader an idea of what the speaker is seeing and hearing. Also, again she uses personification to give the bird human characteristics. Talking about the bird as it "came" down the walk is an example of this. Emily uses symbols to give the bird human qualities. She says that the bird "bit an angle-worm in halves/And ate the fellow, raw." Ironically the word "raw" shows an implication of human values and practices. Why would you expect the bird to cook its food? Emily then goes on to talk about the bird drinking dew "From a convenient grass" which can be symbolic of a glass a human would drink from. The bird is then polite to a beetle by hopping sidewise to the wall. This statement gives the bird a personality,

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