Emily Dickinson The Heart Asks By: Mary Jo Childers

The Heart Asks By: Emily Dickinson The heart asks pleasure first And then, excuse from pain; And then those little anodynes That deaden suffering, And then to go to sleep And then, if it should be, The will of its Inquisitor The liberty to die!

The poem info. In the poem Emily didn’t use a rhyme scheme she used a ballad rhyme. The syllable count is 6/6/8/6 this was sometime found in her poems she would make the second and fourth lines in each four-line stanza rhyme with each other, while the first and third lines don't rhyme with anything. The theme of the poem is pleasure vs. pain, especially in love. The meter of the poem is very blunt when the heart goes to sleep it gives it the privilege to die.

Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was born December, 1830, in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. As a young child Emily was very intelligent, she was able to write rhyming stories. Also as a young child her father was very strict on her, Walt Whitman was “too inappropriate” for her. As she grew up she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in south Hadley she returned home after a year. Emily was a relatively shy person, so the poems she started writing were in her letters to her friends and family. The people she came in contact with had a major impact on her poems. Another thing that had a major impact on her earlier poems is religion.

Emily Dickinson Cont. Rumor has it that Emily fell in love with a preacher Charles Wadsworth (who was married) and she renounced him. Although many thought that the preacher never returned the love he did go visit her in 1860 and 1880. After his death Dickinson started writing heart breaking poems. As the years pressed on and war was going on Emily didn’t write about the wars she wrote about real life tragedy. On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55.

Criticism Themes of her poems had to deal mostly with personal life and power. Readers back then loved Dickinson's inspiration in her poems.