英美文学期末考试复习资料

● Emily Dickinson Dickinson’s poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no title, hence are always quoted by their first line. The form of her poetry is often irregular, and her irregular or sometimes inverted sentence structure also confuses readers. Her poems are usually short, concise, simple and direct, and many of them are centered on a single image or symbol and focused on subject matter. But, Dickinson’s poetry, despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness.

I Die for Beauty

This is one of the most popular poems written by Emily Dickinson. Its theme is death, beauty and truth. Two persons died, one for beauty, one for truth. Beauty and truth are one, as Keats said, “Beauty is truth; truth, beauty.” So, as brothers, the two dead persons talked between two neighboring tombs until the moss covered their names on the gravestones. The poetess uses metaphors to change the gloomy atmosphere of death into a very beautiful and warm scene—the tombs become rooms, the dead become intimate brothers… What is most impressive is the unique and fanciful imagination:“…the moss had reached our lips”, which is both beautiful in image and rich in implication.

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

Notes :

(l) The Eyes around - had wrung them dry: The relatives and friends cried and cried so that there were no tears any more.

(2) the King, the God of death. .

(3) With Blue - uncertain stumbling Buzz: The sight of the dying became dim, but her listening

was sensitive.

In her poems about death, Dickinson looked at death from the point of view of both the living and the dying. She even imagined her own death, the loss of her own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown world. This poem is a description of the moment of death, a poem universally considered one of her masterpieces. She was imagining: when she died, a fly buzz—the symbol of death; her relatives and friends had cried too much; the god of death came into the room. She made her last will and gave everything away to her relative and friends. Her sight became dim, but she could hear the fly; she felt as if the buzz was blue, then she could not see the windows, she could not see anything—darkness covered all.

1.What does the poem I Died for Beauty show about Dickinson’s viewpoint on death?

According to this poem, Dickinson thinks death is not terrible, and if one dies for beauty and truth, he can die without regret.

2.Why did Emily Dickinson use so many dashes and capital letters in her poems ?

Emily Dickinson uses dashes as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis.

● Mark Twain’ s Writing Style

a. Twain is known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their life was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed