True Feelings in Billy Collins' Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes
Upon first look, Billy Collins “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” seems to be a wild fantasy for Emily Dickinson that he is entertaining. Upon closer examination, however, the poem reveals his subconscious desire to have sex with his mother and his frustration about his inability to do so, resulting in the displacement of his sexual desires onto Dickinson.
From the beginning, Collins is very detailed with his description. In fact he is quite anal retentive in explaining everything about the encounter. He starts from her outside clothing, “first, her tippet made of tulle” (1) and on through her mass of clothing until finally reaching her “corset”
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The “mother-of-pearl buttons on the back” (7-8) of the dress can be seen as an unconscious “Freudian slip” which reveals Collin’s true sexual feelings toward his mother. He could have referred to the buttons as any color, but he chooses to use the term “mother-of-pearl” (7). Collins then says that he buttons are “so tiny and numerous that it takes forever before [his] hands can part the fabric” (9-10). He seems to be very methodical in his act of undressing Dickinson. He is the one doing the undressing, he is the one in charge, and it is he who is in control of every detail. The simile “like a swimmer dividing the water, and slip inside” (11-12) might refer to Collins slipping into his unconscious and thinking about his mother, forgetting about Dickinson.
The fourth stanza begins with the line “You will want to know that she was standing by an open window in an upstairs bedroom” (13-15) This seems to be more of Collin’s anal retentiveness trying to prove that he is in control. Se is “motionless, a little wide-eyed” (16), which demonstrates her innocence and how helpless she seems to be in this whole situation. By her lack of participation and his over zealous control, one would think that it is more of a rape than a sexual encounter. The phrase “looking out at the orchard below” (17) seems to be a phallic symbol. Dickinson is
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.
This provokes the readers' psyche of a lonesome, fragile individual, standing isolated at the end of an dark, treacherous road. This imagery is successfully used to illustrate a portrait of Dickinson, or even the individual reading the piece themselves, as they’re yearning for their new life, which right now is filled with darkness and sorrow. The poem is comprised of five stanzas, each consisting of four lines. The monotonous nature of the poem is nothing gleaming or eye catching, and this is purposely done for the conspicuous fact that sometimes, precious values and things you love are vaporized. With the abandonment of something important, the world does not stop revolving around you and seemingly mold itself for you. It will continue to revolve in the same way it always has for four and half billion years, but now only seeming to be filled with darkness, difficulty and
The narrator believes you do not have to attend church to be spiritual and that common practice can be done in a peaceful place such as the orchard in her yard. The last two lines of the poem state, “So instead of getting to Heaven, at last- / I’m going, all along” (Dickinson 639). I interpreted this as the long journey to heaven has become a huge part of her life. It is not just a look into the future, but a continuous look in the present. The symbols Dickinson uses in this poem are by far the highlight of this short piece of poetry. In the first stanza, a bobolink and orchard are used to replace things that modern churches value as sacred and holy. Those natural occurrences are used by Dickinson to show her love for nature. More examples of this are shown in the second stanza. The narrator uses her own “sexton” to call her holly time instead of a brass bell to call church service. This is important to analyze as yet another natural occurrence that highly defines the authors writing style.
Emily Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, is regarded as one of America’s best poets. After a poor experience at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she was regarded as a “no hope,” her writing career took off in full swing. Although her family was more conservative, regular churchgoers, and socially prominent town figures, Dickinson preferred a socially reserved lifestyle that renounced the traditional values of her day (Baym, 1189-93). The iconoclastic spirit pervasive in Emily Dickinson's poetry reflects her conflict with the traditions of New England society.
“Success is counted sweetest, by those who ne’er succeed.” -Emily Dickinson. When Dickinson speaks of the pain of failure and the satisfaction of victory, she speaks from experience. The hermit-like poet wrote nearly 2,000 poems by the time she died at 55. Emily Dickinson was a reserved poet and her work was largely unpopular during her life. She wrote under the topics of mortality and romance, however her works are always questioned of originality and for their vague nature.
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
The start of the poem illustrates how women gave up the pleasure and “playthings of her life” (Dickinson). This hints at how women are intimidated in social gatherings, and how they make themselves into the norms of society and make
The language present in Emily Dickinson’s poetry is at times unclear, sometimes ungrammatical and can be found to be disjunctive. Dickinson wrote in distinct brevity, irregular grammar, peculiar punctuation and hand picked diction. Her poems were written in a circular manner, where she took the reader to one place and them swept them back to the beginning always relating one metaphor to the next. Dickinson was an intimate person throughout her life, and her poems reflect that lifestyle. Like her poems, she was never quite figured out. Dickinson wrote not for the audience to understand but for her own self
To understand the extent that Dickinson’s modernist tendencies shine through in Adrienne Rich’s writings, it is important to first explore the impact Dickinson had on Rich’s life and compositions in general. It is no accident that Rich adapts styles and themes from Dickinson’s poetry; many parallels can be drawn between Dickinson’s and Rich’s life, including how “she [like Dickinson] set herself apart [from society’s framework] in order to define her own emotional and social territory” (Martin, 171). Also, both writers revered and feared their fathers, even though both chose to pit themselves “in opposition to [their fathers], to live according to [their] own premises” (Langdell, 166). Although Rich states that she could not have lived her life the way Emily Dickinson does in her essay “Vesuvius at Home: the Power of Emily Dickinson (1975),” she also admits that she has “come to understand her necessities [and] could have been a witness in her defense” (Rich, 158). Rich admires Dickinson, even calling some poems of her own mere “imitations”
While much of Emily Dickinson's poetry has been described as sad or morose, the poetess did use humor and irony in many of her poems. This essay will address the humor and/ or irony found in five of Dickinson's poems: "Faith" is a Fine Invention, I'm Nobody! Who are you?, Some keep the Sabbath Going to Church and Success Is Counted Sweetest. The attempt will be made to show how Dickinson used humor and / or irony for the dual purposes of comic relief and to stress an idea or conclusion about her life and environment expressed by the poetess in the respective poem. The most humorous or ironic are some of the shorter poems, such as the four lined stanzas of "Faith" is a Fine Invention and
Seventy-five years after the 1890s publication of the premier volumes of Emily Dickinson's poetry, critics still squabble about the poet's possibly lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Indeed, the specifics of Dickinson's relationship to Susan are ambiguous at best. All of the critical attention that her mysterious sexuality
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
At first Glance, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” by Emily Dickinson is puzzling, even meaningless. However, upon further analysis it is clear that the poet has made several deliberate choices to assist the reader in discerning the poems meaning. Her deployment of poetic devices correlates to the narrative she is writing, allowing the reader to deeply perceive the poems message. Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” provides commentary on an individual’s ability to decide who can enter the most intimate parts of her life, which the reader can empathize with through figurative language, repetitive sounds, and enjambment.
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.