Emily Dickinson 写作特点分析

Reflection on Features of Emily Dickinson’s PoemsEmily Dickson was a brilliant poet in American literature. She stayed almost all her life in the same yard except for a visit of a few weeks to Washington, D. C. and she never married. She studied at Amherst Academy, which was strongly Congregational. But she refused to observe its religious customs. She is an American poet in theme and technique. Her poems are parts of what F. O. Matthiessen terms “American Renaissance.”Here I want to talk about the subjects and features of her poems.The subject matter of Emily’s poems is mainly about death, eternity, nature, religion love, and agony. .The first one is nature. As I mentioned before, Emily preferred to live a private life, so she didn’t know what happened in the outside world and what she cared were just her inner world and her friends. She observed nature closely and described it vividly. 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. Take the 204 for instant. “A slash of blue---/ a sweep of gray/ some scarlet patches on the way/ Compose an evening sky…A bank of day/ this just makes out the morning sky.”She described the beautiful scenery of the dawn and dusk in a minute way and she used the bank to separate the day and night.The second is death, which takes a large proportion in her poems. There were some important friends in her life, such as Benjamin Newton and Charles Wadsworth. They died before Emily, which made her very sad and close to the feeling of death. In 1732, “My life closed twice before its close/ in yet remain to see/ If immortality unveil/ A third event to me”, there “twice” means the death of Newton and Wadsworth who are Emily’s“tutors”. From her poems, we can find that Emily described Death vividly, just like she has died once. She even wrote the death of herself, “I heard a fly buzz…when I died”.The third one is eternity. In 449, “I died for Beauty/ but was scarce…and I---died for truth---themslef are one---/ We Bretheren, are”, she thought that the eternity was the combination of Truth and Beauty. They talked between the tombs which reflected the first principle of poems, writing with the true feeling and the beauty stems from that. Another is religion. She wrote about her doubt and belief about religious subjects. As I mentioned, Emily was born in a religious family and taught in a school with strong religious atmosphere. She still influenced by religious belief. She wrote “Jesus Permit Thy Gracious/ Name to stand/ As the First efforts of an infants hand” when she was fifteen. But she didn’t believe it. She read Bible and knew some religious knowledge because of her family. Many poems of her had used the allusion of Bible. “Faith is afine invention/ When Gentleman can see/ But Microscopes are prudent/ In an Emergency”. There used the allusion of “seeing with the eyes of faiths” to tell those who didn’t believe God should observe the world with other ways.In her later poems, agony takes a large part. The agony may come from her tragic love experience and the death of her friends. It maybe comes from the contradiction of her religious belief. And she was a girl of introversion and her life was more or less closed from the outside world. In 241,“I like a look of Agony/ Because I know it’s true/ Men do not sham Convulsion/ Nor simulate, a Throe---”, she thought that life was full of agony and agony is more real compared with happiness.The subject love has special meaning to Emily, in my opinion. As a woman, she didn’t marry all her life. Though had experienced romantic relationship, she was still alone and decided to be single. She was eager to love, which could be seen from her description of the happy time of lovers. She had her own opinion about love. The style of her love poems are criticized by others for the erotic image. She was very original. From “Love ---is anterior to life---/ Posterior--- to Death---Initial of Creation, and--- / The Exponent of Earth---”, she reflected her value of love. In her thoughts, love was loyal and steadfast. In this short poem, love is together with religion. Maybe a woman writer makes the poem of love very vivid because woman has a more sensitive and minute heart than men.After talking about the subjects of her poems, I’d like to say something about the features of her poems.In forms of her poems, the most obvious feature of her pomes is no titled. She had written over 1,700 poems, none of them had a title. They are named by numbers and quoted by the first line. Such as her famous one, “Success is counted sweetest”. Another is that dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters are means of emphasis. There are many dashes in her poems, the number of which is much more than commas and full points. It seems that she didn’t like to use other punctuations. The use of letters is not of regular. In one sentence, there can be many capital letters which is quite different from the formal use. Her poems are usually short, rarely more than twenty lines, and many of them are centered on a single image or symbol and focused on one subject matter. Her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness and plainness. These features are easily found in each of her poems.Four lines of her poems are usually one stanza, such as “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stop at all”. But there are some exceptions that one or two lines make up one stanza. The form of her poems is like the hymns in community churches, familiar communal and sometimes irregular. Her poems are almost with rhymes. Take 1129 as example, “Tell all the Truth but tell its slant/ Success in Circuit lies/ Too bright for our infirmDelight/ The Truth’s superb surprise”. Here the rhymes words are “slant” and “Delight”, “lies” and “surprise”.The basic tone of her poems is tragic, because Calvinism with its doctrine of predestination and its pessimism pressured her during her children and adolescence and colored her work. This is similar with the subject, agony.Emily Dickinson lived in a narrow circled life, so most of her poems are about her own feelings. She is a representative poet of American Romanticism.。