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 scheme of poem 632 are constructed to match the meter and rhyme scheme of traditional Christian hymns. We need only compare Dickinson's poem 632 with "Amazing Grace" to see that the form is mimicked fairly precisely -- the only difference is that Dickinson does not rhyme her first and third lines, while traditional hymns use a rhyme scheme of ABAB. But Dickinson's poem can actually be sung to the tune of "Amazing Grace" if the reader so chooses. In addition, Dickinson's idiosyncratic use of dashes is familiar to anyone who has ever looked at a Christian hymn-book that contains both music and lyrics: ordinarily such dashes are used to indicate a word in the lyrics that is intended to be extended over more than one note. Dickinson's biographer Lyndall Gordon (2011) notes that Dickinson was raised in a conventional Christian household in Massachusetts, and that "each Sunday that combination of scripture and hymn metre fell on the ears of a child who would one day deploy that metre as the poet she was to be" (30). It is clear, then, that the form of Dickinson's poem 632 is meant to strike the reader as one inspired by, and alluding to, traditional Christian belief. But is Dickinson actually writing a Christian hymn? It seems clear that Dickinson is writing a poem that approaches Christianity riddlingly: in some sense,...
Unlike most traditional Christian hymns -- in which each independent verse basically expresses the same thing (i.e., praise of God) -- Dickinson's poem has a more dramatic structure. Although the form of the poem suggests Christianity immediately to the knowledgeable reader, the subject of Christianity itself is not raised until the end of the poem, as a sort of surprise.
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
She dislikes the way that members of the church use the name God to enforce their own temporal values and thoughts of sin. Although Dickinson believed: "This World is not Conclusion," she added the caution that "Philosophy" and "Sagacity, must go" to explain the mystery of human existence. Every person must search for their own answers, beyond the confines of the rationality of the church (510). Dickinson honors Christ: "Men
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