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The Influence Of Treading In Emily Dickinson's Poems

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Emily Dickinson was an American poet who was born on December tenth, 1830. Emily Dickinson lived a very secluded life and preferred to stay in her home in New England and she even lived in isolation starting in the 1860s only seeing close family members (“Emily Dickinson”, poets.org). Dickinson began to write while spending her days in her home reading. Her style of writing and themes were influenced by seventeenth century English poetry (“Emily Dickinson”, poets.org). Her puritan and religious upbringing also led to her different style of writing (“Emily Dickinson”, poets.org). Her poems were never published when she was alive, instead they were found after her passing and published. When they found her poems after she passed they discovered she had written around 1,800 poems (“Emily Dickinson”, poets.org)! Most of her poems are about death and some experts even believe that her poems are written in a specific order and have …show more content…

The speaker believes that a part of her is dying when she realizes that she is going into madness. The “mourners” are visualized as treading hard with heavy steps. The treading is counteracting the em-dashes in the stanza and that theme continues throughout the poem. Their treading represents the pressures of life stomping on the speaker’s mind. The treading is not just light walking it is hard and forceful. With the pressure of the treading and the “mourners”, the speaker begins to spiral into the realization of them self going mad their thoughts become jumbled up in madness. The second stanza of the poem transitions to the “mourners” becoming silent and sitting uniformed in their spots. But as the stanza progresses the “drums” beating down on the speaker. The drums are a representation of outside forces of their life beating down on their mind. It shows that pressures of life truly weigh down on us as humans and can drive us into

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