Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Daily Objectives DOL exercises met·a·phor  n. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in "a sea of troubles" or "All the world's a stage" (Shakespeare). Daily Objectives DOL exercises Grammar Quiz (B3) Results and Review Discuss Dickinson Poetry please give this parcel to whomever is inside of the room lawrence if no one is their bring it to the office 2. that Skater in blue jeans don’t know whether to compete tonight or in the next weeks race

please give this parcel to whomever is inside of the room lawrence if no one is their bring it to the office   2. that Skater in blue jeans don’t know whether to compete tonight or in the next weeks race

The Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very difficult to place her in any single tradition--she seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Her poetic form, with her customary four-line stanzas, QUATRAIN ABCB rhyme schemes, and alternations in iambic meter between tetrameter and trimeter, is derived from Psalms and Protestant hymns, but Dickinson so thoroughly appropriates the forms--interposing her own long, rhythmic dashes designed to interrupt the meter and indicate short pauses--that the resemblance seems quite faint. Her subjects are often parts of the topography of her own psyche; she explores her own feelings with painstaking and often painful honesty but never loses sight of their universal poetic application; one of her greatest techniques is to write about the particulars of her own emotions in a kind of universal homiletic or adage-like tone ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes") that seems to describe the reader's mind as well as it does the poet's. Dickinson is not a "philosophical poet"; unlike Wordsworth or Yeats, she makes no effort to organize her thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified worldview. Rather, her poems simply record thoughts and feelings experienced naturally over the course of a lifetime devoted to reflection and creativity: the powerful mind represented in these records is by turns astonishing, compelling, moving, and thought-provoking, and emerges much more vividly than if Dickinson had orchestrated her work according to a preconceived philosophical system. Of course, Dickinson's greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is her brilliant, diamond-hard language. Dickinson often writes aphoristically, meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning into a very small number of words. This can make her poems hard to understand on a first reading, but when their meaning does unveil itself, it often explodes in the mind all at once, and lines that seemed baffling can become intensely and unforgettably clear. Other poems--many of her most famous, in fact--are much less difficult to understand, and they exhibit her extraordinary powers of observation and description. Dickinson's imagination can lead her into very peculiar territory--some of her most famous poems are bizarre death-fantasies and astonishing metaphorical conceits--but she is equally deft in her navigation of the domestic, writing beautiful nature-lyrics alongside her wild flights of imagination and often combining the two with great facility.

A bird came down the walk: He did not know I saw; He bit an angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw. And then he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass. He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all abroad,-- They looked like frightened beads, I thought; He stirred his velvet head Like one in danger; cautious, I offered him a crumb, And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home Than oars divide the ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or butterflies, off banks of noon, Leap, splashless, as they swim. Her seeking the crux of experience affected her style. As part of her seeking essence or the heart of things, she distilled or eliminated inessential language and punctuation from her poems. She leaves out helping verbs and connecting words; she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what her pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language. Her disregard for the rules of grammar and sentence structure is one reason twentieth century critics found her so appealing; her use of language anticipates the way modern poets used language. The downside of her language is that the compression may be so drastic that the poem is incomprehensible; it becomes a riddle or intellectual puzzle. Dickinson said in a letter, "All men say 'what' to me"; readers are still saying "What?" in response to some of her poems. Her seclusion may have contributed to the obscurity of her poetry. One danger of living alone, in one's own consciousness, is that the individual will begin to create private meanings for words and private symbols, which others do not have the key to. So language, instead of communicating, baffles the reader. Dickinson does fall into this trap occasionally. Dickinson was enamored of language; she enjoyed words for their own sake, as words. One of her amusements was to read Webster's Dictionary (1844) and savor words and their definitions. This interest gives a number of her poems their form--they are really definitions of words, for example "Pain has an element of blank," "Renunciation is a piercing virtue," or "Hope is the thing with feathers." Sometimes consulting the 1844 dictionary clarifies a line, for a meaning appearing in her dictionary may no longer be used. Her linguistic mastery and sense of the dramatic combine in the often striking first lines of her poems, such as "Just lost when I was saved!," "I like a look of Agony," and "I can wade grief." Look at the first lines of the poems in your textbook for other examples. Dickinson consistently uses the meters of English hymns. This is undoubtedly one reason why modern composers like Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland have set her poems to music and why the dancer Martha Graham choreographed them as a ballet. Knowing other stylistic characteristics may help you read her poetry: She uses the dash to emphasize, to indicate a missing word or words, or to replace a comma or period. She changes the function or part of speech of a word; adjectives and verbs may be used as nouns; for example, in "We talk in careless--and in loss," careless is an adjective used as a noun. She frequently uses be instead of is or are. She tends to capitalize nouns, for no apparent reason other than that they are nouns. To casual readers of poetry, it may seem that Dickinson uses rhyme infrequently. They are thinking of exact rhyme (see, tree). She does use rhyme, but she uses forms of rhyme that were not generally accepted till late in the nineteenth century and are used by modern poets. Dickinson experimented with rhyme, and her poetry shows what subtle effects can be achieved with these rhymes. Dickinson uses identical rhyme (sane, insane) sparingly. She also uses eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhymes (see, buy), imperfect rhymes (time, thin), and suspended rhyme (thing, along). A reassurance: I don't expect you to memorize these categories or to write about them; I would just like you to be aware of the variety of rhymes and of Dickinson's poetic practices.

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me. Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

This is my letter to the world, That never wrote to me,-- The simple news that Nature told, With tender majesty. Her message is committed To hands I cannot see; For love of her, sweet countrymen, Judge tenderly of me! To my readers Who did not know me These poems are about what was so obvious Written with love The poems message is for The people I will never meet I loved my poems, you who read it, Love me because you loved those poems that I wrote

What about your own poems? If we were to take the time to analyze your poem could we break it down? Could we summarize it? What is it’s form? And what kind of commentary could we make about it? You were asked to create a metaphor of poetry. Poetry is singing to me. A song of fluid movement, Simple one-two, one-two I don’t always know what is meant in six-eight and twenty-three If I were a writer “Why should everything be a mystery?” That’s the first question to be If it were up to me But singing – It’s all clear Hallelujah and Praise to Thee. Poetry is a woman Eyes of cold black Hair of bound in steel Skin bleached white Misunderstood Often misquoted Always in a mood Heart of gold Fingers cold Full of mystery.