Emily Dickinson Research Paper

The poem contains two stanzas with two different settings. One might not know much about the first stanza; however, in the second one the speaker is next to an ocean, perhaps, at a beach. So, while the first stanza symbolizes the mindset of the speaker, the inner dream, the second stanza symbolizes the outer dream which is what we see; life. The poem

In the first stanza it is the semantic field of water: ‘waters’ (twice), ‘sea’, ‘drowning’ and ‘being drawn’. As I mentioned earlier, water is often the symbol of life but it also evokes tears, sadness and despair.

The View of an Unlimited and Limited Mind Found in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry (Emily Dickinson’s Views on an Unlimited and Limited Mind through Her Poetry) In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, her views of the human mind are expressed. In some poems, readers can interpret her poetry concluding that she believes that the human mind is unlimited; but in others the mind or even life is limited. When we read her poems like “The Brain is Wider than the Sky,” we notice the view of boundless thought that is unlimited.

In the third stanza it says, “And the poems that had been hiding / in the eyes of skunks for centuries / crawled out and curled up at his [the man’s] feet.” In these lines, you can almost imagine the “meanings of the skunks” coming out and becoming noticeable to the man. The man saw the skunks as beautiful, because he was able to see past how they looked and how the world saw them, he saw deeper inside them: he saw into their eyes. In their eyes he saw their true meanings, and beautiful the skunks really were. You can imagine the meanings of the skunks becoming clear to the man, almost as if they had “crawled up at his

The poem begins with using “melodies” as an image. In the first phrase, “Like melodies draw it to me softly through the mind,” the word “melodies” seems to be symbolic of thoughts or memories. These melodies are like a tune that you cannot get out of your head, a memory that he is unable to forget.

Publication remained a considerable conflict throughout her writing. A publisher for her writing was never easily arranged. She befriended Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Republican and for four years sent him poems and letters for publication. Because Bowles did not comprehend Dickinson’s poems only two were published, and even those were published anonymously. Both poems were heavily edited and given titles that she had not given or was not aware of. Only five other poems were published in her lifetime, each altered by editors.

Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the ongoings of her life. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830, as a younger sister and soon to be older sister. She was born as the middle child of three children. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was a stay-at-home

Dickinson declares that the brain is wider than the sky, if they are held side by side, the brain will absorb the sky “With ease—and You—beside.” She says that the brain is deeper than the sea, for if they are held “Blue to Blue,” the brain will absorb the sea as sponges and buckets absorb water. The brain, the speaker insists, is the “weight of God”—for if they are held  “Pound for Pound,” the brain’s weight will differ from the weight of God only in the way that syllable differs from sound. Throughout the poem Dickinson seems to be expressing her overall admiration for the brain,one of the body's most important components. She also uses many figurative devices such as rhyme and parallelism.

With Emily’s ideas, she made over eight hundred carefully wrapped pieces of poetry which sat in her room until her death when her sister published them to the public. When Emily got older she lost so many loved ones (A close friend, a man she believed to have loved, her father and mother, her favorite nephew, and her dog). With the terrible deaths happening around her impacting her life heavily. She retreated further and further into her room not saying a word to anyone or even coming out. When her father died she didn’t even attend the funeral. She stayed in her room leaving the door slightly open. Eventually her own health began to decline and the eloquent and mysterious poet knew her time was up also. The last letter she ever wrote was to her cousins and said “Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily”. On May 15, 1886, Emily Dickerson died at the age of fifty-five. The attending physician stated that her cause of death was Bright’s disease, a kidney disease now called acute or chronic nephritis. After Emily’s death, Lavinia Dickinson published her remaining poems she wrote. In 1955, there was a book that was published with the remaining poems that she wrote for the family and the

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

“But there is genius in their hatred, there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you” (Lines 23-24). In Charles Bukowski’s poem, “A Genius in the Crowd,” he speaks pessimistically about the human brain and disrespects the good that comes from it, yet does not hold back on describing its power. He uses dark, extreme examples to describe hidden truths in today 's society. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “[The Brain—is wider than the Sky—],” she talks about the power of the human brain, complimenting and respecting it to things thought to be incomparable. Both Dickinson’s and Bukowski’s poems show the strength and power of the human mind, but their views on what the brain accomplishes are far from similar.

“The sky's the limit,” but when the brain is wider than the sky, the brain, or mind, in comparison, makes the seemingly boundless sky a mere speckle within the vast complexity of the mind. Emily Dickinson writes of such complexity in her poem “The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky,” where her simple, yet conspicuously unusual, prose proposes a far more intense, and thought-provoking, meaning to her three stanzas of sky, sea, and God. Dickinson’s style of writing can often be defined by her characteristic choice of dashed lines of a ballad meter, three quatrains consisting of an ABCB rhyme scheme, and iambic pentameter in alternating tetra- and tri-meter. Structurally, her poems are straightforward and rather uncomplicated, making the outright message

After awhile it got worse that she even sent her sister to get her dresses fitted for her in addition she started wearing just white. There she wrote many pomes however not as much as before “in 1863 she wrote 140 poems; in 1864 she wrote 172; in 1865 she wrote eighty-four from 1866 to 1886, she wrote another 708 poems an average of about 35 per year.” (The Importance of Emily Dickinson) She as well discarded the residents whenever they asked to publish her poems. This was for the reason that she was scared that Higginson we see her poems, and then find out the games she played on him. On one occasion Helen Hunt Jackson a woman that she knew from her childhood knocked at her door and asked to publish one of her pomes for her however, Dickinson non-surprisingly refused. Jackson explained how it would go in a book and would not say any names however, she still refused. Later, she finally agreed after asking plenty of

While reading the poem you cannot get a lot from it about Dickinson but you can understand her philosophy about the human body. The beginning stanza “The Brain is wider then the sky, for, put them side to side”. She is saying that the two are the same in many ways. The sky is endless and always growing, as is a brain. We know that Emily Dickinson was very educational. She went to Amherst Academy schools and was a very out standing student. At the time when she wrote this poem there was a lot of thing happening such as the civil war and slavery and the Underground

In this, one could see that the speaker might be talking about death: “And when at Night –“; and how the speaker prefers the comfort of his/her faith over the comforts of the world: “I guard My Master’s Head - / ‘Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s / Deep Pillow – to have shared-” (13-16). The tone of this poem ranges from emptiness, to fullness, to joy, to complete satisfaction, and one can follow this progression through the stanzas. In the beginning, the subject, or character, was flat