Purple is the color of dusk and twilight, a time in-between day and night, night and day. As such, purple symbolizes transition and transformation. Color is often a mystical symbol for Dickinson in her poetry. Silver and gold make frequent appearances; Dickinson writes about "An everywhere of silver," whereas gold is used in relation to sunlight in "Nature, the gentlest mother." In "Nature rarer uses yellow," Dickinson admires the sparing use of the hue in the natural world. For Dickinson, each color conveys a mood or meaning; its appearance in nature is never arbitrary. Her liberal use of color imagery suggests a deep contemplation of color as an interface between the mundane and mystical worlds.
Spiritual themes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson usually centers on religious awakenings, revivalism, and on personal relationships with God. In "Will there really be a morning?" The narrator is a "little pilgrim" crying out to "some wise man from the skies," (lines 11; 10). Angelic imagery and wings are also key motifs in Dickinson's religious poems. For example, in "Some keep the Sabbath going to church," the narrator wears her wings "instead of tolling the bell for church," (line 7). In fact, Dickinson's poetry reflects her solitary spirituality and personal mysticism. The poet unabashedly avows her choice to pursue religion on her own time and in her own terms in "Some keep the Sabbath going to church." The poem is overtly autobiographical, "Some keep the Sabbath going to church; / I keep it staying at home," (lines 1-2).
Dickinson's poetry reflects prevailing social and religious themes of the nineteenth century. The Great Awakening and religious revivalism that characterized Christianity in America during Dickinson's lifetime allowed, even encouraged personal approaches toward God. Mysticism was tolerated to the extent that Dickinson herself practiced it: by secluding herself in her home and contemplating spiritual themes in her poetry and prose. Transcendentalism in literature...
Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound Ezra Pound's poem "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is inspired by Chinese poetry, and dramatizes the situation of the Chinese wife of a traveling salesman. In its empathetic portrayal of the life of a woman, it resembles poems by Emily Dickinson -- but the difference is, of course, that Pound's form is fundamentally dramatic. Pound announces, in his title, the speaker of the poem. Dickinson's lyric
Emily Dickinson and "The World is Not Conclusion" The poems of Emily Dickinson have been interpreted in a multitude of ways and often it is hard to separate the narrator of her works with the woman who wrote them. Few authors have such a close association between the individual and their work as Emily Dickinson. In Dickinson's poetry, the narrator and the poet are often seen as interchangeable beings. Themes that
" typical way in which a poem by Dickinson is structured is by the use of the "omitted center." This means that an initial statement is followed by an apparent lack in development and continuity and the inclusion of strange and seemingly alien ideas. However, these often contradictory ideas and images work towards a sense of wholeness and integrity which is essentially open-ended in terms of its meaning. "Often the
The study of geology becomes a central underlying theme in many of her works due to the influence of Hitchcock. Dickinson adopted the view that the study of nature should be an intermingled spiritual as well as naturalist journey, and as a result, places strong emphasis on how to explore spiritual and romantic Truth, through the allegory of nature and geology. Dickinson's poetic vision was not to advocate the strong
.. "I could not see to see" (from Dickinson, "465"). Words; phrases, and lines of poetry composed by Dickinson, within a given poem, are also typically set off, bookend-like (if not ruptured entirely at the center) by her liberal use of various punctuation "slices" (or perhaps "splices" is the better word) appearing most often in the form of either short and/or longer dashes (or combinations of these), e.g.: "-"; and/or
Emily Dickinson's poem 632 ("The Brain -- is wider than the sky -- ") is, in its own riddling way, a poem that grapples with the Christian religion, while at the same time being a poem about the poetic imagination itself. Dickinson's religious concerns are perhaps most evident when considering the form of the poem (and indeed the form of so many of her poems). The meter and the rhyme
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