Sunrise in Amherst The Features of Emily Dickinsons poetry Speaker:
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Transcript of Sunrise in Amherst The Features of Emily Dickinsons poetry Speaker:
Sunrise in Amherst
The Features of Emily Dickinson’s poetry
Speaker:吴倩
Here’s a short list of indicating frequency of Emily Dickinson’s used favorite words in her 1775 poems:
170: sun 141: death, face 130: god, time 125: soul 124: heart 121: night
106: love 102: bird 94: die 88: eyes 86: bee, home 82: light 77: sky
Subject matters
Death and Immortality
Nature
Love
Religion
Success and Failure
Unity of Goodness, Truth and Beauty
Other Subjects
•Death and immortality are the center of Dickinson’s poems (one third).
•She expects to understand the meaning of life by understanding the meaning of death.
•“I Heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”•“Because I could not stop for Death”•“My life closed twice before its close”
She was skeptical and ambivalent about the possibility of achieving immortality.
I heard a Fly buzz– when I died—
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—
The Eyes around– had wrung them dry—
And breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—
I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—and then it was
There interposed a Fly—
With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice fell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
Dickinson’s many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur often in the Amherst of the time added to her gloomy meditation. “My life closed twice before its close” portrays the poet as ever-ready for the assault of death.
Nature
• Natural phenomena, changes of seasons, heavenly bodies, animals, birds and insects, flowers of various kinds—all these and many other subjects related to nature find their way into her poetry.
• The mixed feelings of joy and grief at the coming of spring and autumn, the sense of momentary transitoriness(短暂,瞬间 ) and the power and majesty of summer storm.
• In the meantime the cold indifference of nature is also revealed in her poems.
Dickinson was original. The way she wrote about love is a good case in point.
“Mine—by the Right of the White Election” expresses a passionate and eternal love in an elegiac ( 悲伤的 )tone.
“Wild Nights—Wild Nights”, Love is expressed in an unabashed manner with evident erotic image.
Charles Wadsworth
•Dickinson holds that beauty, truth and goodness are ultimately one.
•John Keats—
“beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
•“I died for Beauty—but was scarce”
•Strong influence of Calvinism on her thought (pessimism and tragic tone of her poems);
•exploring human’s inner world (psychology description in her poems);
•Her poems abounds in telling original images;
•Good at catching the charm of something but dropping the thing itself;
•Severe economy of expression;
•Brief, direct and plain language
We passed the School, where Children stroveAt Recess—in the Ring—We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—We passed the Setting Sun—
We passed the school where children playedTheir lessons scarcely done;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.
Here are two versions of one stanza of one of her poems. The first is unedited; the second has been “corrected.”
• Overuse of capitalization & dashes( 破折号 );• The use of deletions;• Absence of connective words;• Irregular rhymes;• Wrenched grammar & syntax; e.g. "A Wonderful—to Feel the Sun."
Characteristics of Poetic Forms
Rhetorical Devices
Oxymoron (矛盾修饰法)
Synesthesia (联觉)
Alliteration(头韵),vowel rhyme(叠韵)
Metaphor
PersonificationDeath is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
“Dissolve” says Death—The Spirit “Sir
I have another Trust”—
Capitalization of Her Poems• German, a language Dickinson knew, typically
capitalizes nouns. • Capitalized words gives additional emphasis.• Some critics (Habegger) believe that her use is
at times idiosyncratic and more random than meaningful, since in some instances a word is capitalized in one of Dickinson's handwritten copies of a poem but not in another of her copies.
•marks to guide readers on how the passage should be read or phrased;•To makes readers ponder words and phrases;•To cause reflection and intensity;•To slow reader or call attention.
The Use of Dashes
I Like to See It Lap the Miles
I like to see it lap the Miles—
And lick the Valleys up—
And stop to feed itself at tanks—
And then—prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains—
And supercilious peer
In Shanties—by the sides of Roads—
And then a Quarry pare
To fit it’s sides
And crawl between
Complainig all the while
In horrid—hooting stanza—
Then—chase itself down Hill—
And neigh like Boanerges—
Then—prompter than a Star
Stop—docile and omnipotent
At it’s own stable door—
She tells about the railway is as impressive as her striking image of a galloping horse intended as a symbol both of the railroad and developing America.