Emily Dickinson

This past week for my English class, we have been reading poems by Emily Dickinson. here is my favorite poem:

441 by Emily Dickinson

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

Emily Dickinson’s writing “about death confront its grim reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, and above all a refusal to be comforted.” Her lines about death in poem 479: “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me,” give the indication that she had a sense of when her own mortality would end, because her “final decades were marked by health problems.”

When Emily Dickinson was releasing her thoughts to the world and trying to make a name or place for herself in society when she writes her first lines of her poem 519: “this is my letter to the world/ that never wrote to me,” seem like a prophetic message about the future when the poems were transcribed by Mabel Todd after Dickinson’s death.

Since Emily Dickinson’s poetry “focused on the speaker’s response to a situation rather than the details of the situation itself,” Dickinson put in many lines about her nervousness of her writing being read by her peers like the last line in 519: “For love of her- Sweet- countrymen/ Judge tenderly- of me.” She wanted people to enjoy reading her writing when she was gone as much as she enjoyed putting her thoughts to paper: “The simple News that Nature told- with tender Majesty.” Emily Dickinson definitely imagined people reading her poems for the first time and what they would think of her: “Her Message is committed/ to hands I cannot see.”

Dickinson knew what it mean to be a fan of someone’s writing and had admired Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, but “did not go next door to meet Emerson in 1857 when he stayed at the Evergreens during a lecture tour- preferring the Emerson she could imagine to the actual presence.” She preferred imagining what the world was like instead of being realistic about it, which is why she was thought of as “a reclusive, eccentric, death-obsessed spinster.”

For an assignment, we had to write a parody of a Emily Dickinson poem so here's the one I wrote:

I saw a ship in harbor
Glass elevators in the aft
Orange lifeboats dress for battle
Uprising waves of matter

Boats rocking from East to West
Rocks vowing to take soldiers
Those who came off tendering
New lands viewed by broken eyes