1. December 10, 1830- May 15, 1886 EMILY DICKINSON

2. About Emily  1874 her father died  Being an already reclusive person, she became even more withdrawn from the world. She mainly talked to friends through letters  Over the ten years her mother, nephew, and close friends Samuel Bowles and Charles Wadsworth died.  In 1884 Dickinson was diagnosed with a severe kidney disease called Bright’s Disorder. She died 2 years later  Her unpublished poems were found by her sister, Lavinia, after her death.  1890 her poems were published in three volumes

3. Emily’s Writing Style Considered too unconventional to be published during her lifetime. She often used: dashes to create a varied rhythm. off rhymes are word that kind of rhyme but don’t really unusual metaphors Major Themes in her works  Life  Death  Time  Eternity/ Religion  Love  Nature

4. I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of a storm. The eyes beside me had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in all his power. I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable,- and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see. Simile Situational Irony

5. My life closed twice before it’s close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. Tone: hopeless, sad, portraying her life as already been over twice Hyperbole: exaggerates the pain of events as being death. Creates an image of her sufferings.

6. 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 that 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.

7. Dickinson, Emily. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ney York City: Barnes & Noble Books, 2003.