Dr.Lee
American Lit.
12/4/2015
Main Blog Post 8
The reading that I picked to do the blog post on is Emily Dickinson's poems. The poems themes vary from death to the unknown. Ever from a young age Emily Dickinson was intrigued with death and nature, so a lot of her work deals with death and nature. Dickinson grew up next to the city cemetery so she saw most of the city services. Also, the Civil War was going on at the same time she was writing some of these poems. So death surrounded her, for her whole life.
In the first portion of her collection of poems they deal with nature and life it is not until later where she starts to engulf her writing with death. So the first poem I'm going to talk about is poem 340 on page 1673. The poem starts off with Dickinson saying " I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (LN 1). I think this means that the writer was depressed and wanted to be left alone. The poem goes on to talk about depression and how it feels. In the second stanza Dickinson said " A Service, like a Drum" (6). This quote leads me to believe that the author had a pounding head ache. The next poem that I'm going to talk about is more upbeat and that poem is 598 on page 1686. This poem has three really descriptive metaphors that describes the brain. The first metaphor that Dickinson uses in the poem is " The Brain - is wider than the sky" (LN 1). This is talking about how the brain does so much its hard for us to fathom it and the sky is so large its also hard to fathom. The second metaphor is "The Brain is deeper than the sea" (5). The metaphor is talking about how the brain can learn so much its almost endless. The final metaphor is "The Brain is just the weight of God"(9). This means even though the brain is endless with knowledge it still bares the weight of anxiety and worry.
Emily Dickinson is one of Americas best poet because she wrote about stuff that people normally didn't want to talk about. She talked about death, religion, and nature. She is one of the most influential.
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th Ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.
