Emily Dickinson

Welcome to StudyClicks Explains, where we provide audio notes and analysis on junior cycle and leaving some topics to get you those top marks. We make exams easier. Hi everyone and welcome to this StudyClicks podcast on the poet Emily Dickinson. My name is Peter and I'm an English teacher. I've also got a channel on YouTube called Mr. Tobin Levingsert English, so be sure to check that out for more free resources and videos after you've listened to this podcast. So together we're going to take a look at Emily Dickinson's background, what makes her poetry special and examines some of the poems that have been chosen for the Levingsert syllabus. Now Dickinson is one of those poets that people have often heard about without really knowing anything in detail about her or even any of her work. Her reputation as a recluse, someone who always wore white and who rarely left her own room let alone her for this house, has almost taken over from her poetry, but there's really a lot more to her than that. So what do we know about her? Well Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on 10th December 1830. Her father Edward Dickinson was a lawyer and Emily was the second of three children. Her brother Austin, one year older than her and her sister Levingsert three years younger than her. They were a very close-knit family with Emily and Levingsert in particular being constant companions for Emily's entire life. Emily was well educated and it was something that her father put a great deal of emphasis on. He wanted his children, his daughters as well as his son to benefit from a good education and Emily attended Amherst Academy which was known as a progressive school for the time as well as Mount Holyoke female seminary after she finished in Amherst Academy. She left the seminary after less than a year and has lots of speculation about the reasons why. In her letters she talks of her extreme homesickness and illness, but it seems likely to have been her father's concern about her health. Edward Dickinson's main worry for his children was their health. It makes sense in some ways considering that this was a time before antibiotics and a time of a general lack of understanding about how germs and disease spread. His letters to his children are full of warnings about avoiding sickness and wrapping up well and not going out in bad weather. He even advises him not to go to school if the weather's too bad. Now the biggest threat of all in that time was tuberculosis or TB which was also known as consumption. So this was a lung disease that was responsible for widespread death and large parts of Europe, the United States and elsewhere in the world. It's reported that it was responsible for a 22% of all deaths in Massachusetts, the state that Emily lived in during the mid 19th century and even by the end of that century TB was still the leading cause of death in America. Despite concerns from her father and sometimes from herself that Emily was consumptive or showing signs of TB she did not develop the disease, but that's not to say that Dickinson's were untouched by it. Many of Dickinson's friends and relatives died not just from TB either including her cousin and close friend Sophie Holland who died when she was only 15. That was just a year older than Dickinson at that time who helped to keep watch over her cousin on her deathbed. So it's not surprised then that much of Dickinson's poetry shows a fascination with death as well as the afterlife. There is a point somewhere in Dickinson's mid to late 20s where she begins to retreat from the world. There are many potential reasons for this but most of the speculation centres around a love rejection, maybe mental illness, depression and even possible epilepsy. Now regardless of what the root cause was we do know that she began to avoid social interactions and situations and she rarely left her home, later even rarely leaving her own room. There is a mention at her father's funeral years later that she stayed in her room and just left the door open while the service was going on downstairs. Now this does not mean that she was isolated however and much of what we know about Dickinson comes from her letters. She wrote frenetically to family and friends and acquaintances and even friends of friends. We see through these letters at least the ones that survived a really remarkable person. She cultivates long lasting friendships with people and sometimes scaring off others with her intensity. From her letters there is a clear sense of someone who is intimately in tune with nature. She writes often of birds, flowers, weather, clouds, rain, anything else in her immediate environment, often using nature to capture some element of emotion or even simply the passing of time. We also see someone who can't help being emotional and sensitive, sometimes even embarrassing herself with her enthusiasm. In one letter to a couple that she wrote to frequently the boulders, a husband and wife, she says, "I should like to thank dear Mrs. Balls for the little book, except my cheek is red with shame because I write so often, even the lilies of the field have their dignities." And in another letter she asks that they use the paper that she writes on to light their lamps so that she shall not have lived as she says in vain. So we get the sense of somebody who is really aware that she is maybe writing too often or saying too much but she cannot help herself. In a letter to her cousin, Louise Norcross, she writes, "For you remember dear, you are one of the ones from whom I do not run away." Yet later, in a letter to the same cousin, she shows this intense disappointment when Louise cancels a visit to the house. She says, "Your letter didn't surprise me, Lou. I brushed away the sleep from my eyes familiar with it. Looked again to be sure I read it right, and then took up my work, hemming strings from my mother's gown. I think I hemmed faster for knowing you weren't coming. My fingers had nothing else to do. Odd that I, who say no so much, cannot bear to hear it from others." So from her letters, we get this picture of a young woman who is emotional, sensitive, fiercely intelligent and very honest both emotionally and intellectually. And from her poems, well, we also get a sense of someone who is deeply in tune with nature, concerned or maybe even fascinated with death, but also someone who is innovative, subversive, and she pushes the boundaries of how poetry is written and what poetry can be about. Dickinson's style and form is very distinctive. We can recognise a Dickinson poem very easily by her use of capitalisation and how her poem sound. So take the second stance of hope is the thing that feathers for example. It goes, "And sweetest in the gale is heard and soar must be the storm that could abash the little bird that kept so many warm. Here we can see, or even here if you don't have it in front of you, what's happening?" So the last word of the first line heard is rhyming with the last line of the third line, bird. While the last word of the second line, storm, is close rhyming with the last word of the fourth line, warm. Now these four line stanzas are called quattrains and what we also notice is that the number of syllables alternates every second line. So in that first and third line, there are eight syllables and in the second and fourth lines there are six. We call these lines tetra-meter, so eight syllables means there are four pairs, tetra is four, so that is a tetra-meter line and tri-meter, six syllables, three pairs and so it's tri-meter and the overall name for this style of poetry is common or ballad-meter. Now the poetic tradition up to this point was generally based on iambic pentamano, lined with ten syllables, so think Shakespeare and ports like William Wordsworth. So what Dickinson was really doing was quite revolutionary with her meter and it was directly inspired by the hymns that she would have been hearing as a girl growing up in the first church of Ambrost, the church that her parents attended. Aside from the meter, there are some other notable features of Dickinson's poetry that may get really stand out. So Dickinson is celebrated for her condition. What this means is that she condenses language by removing what she believes to be unnecessary words. This allows her to pack really complex or big ideas into short lines of phrases. Her use of condition is almost like a grenade. It's small and packed really tight, but when it explodes, kind of like when an idea explodes in the reader's mind, it has a massive impact. Another of Dickinson's stand-up features is her use of dashes and other non-traditional punctuation. She uses dashes to connect ideas but also to end lines, giving a sense of incompleteness in places. This works in different ways, so at the end of a poem, the use of the dash leaves the poem with that sense of incompleteness. Even a sense of unknowaleness, something Dickinson probably felt herself and she intended that the reader feel too. The dash used more generally indicates a separation between thoughts and ideas. It shows the connection between ideas as well as giving a reader space and time to fully appreciate and contemplate those ideas. There are of course a whole host of other techniques and tools that Dickinson uses. She uses illiteration, unomatopoeia, striking metaphors and similes, personification as well as others, and we'll see examples of these when we look at her poems individually. Although Dickinson's style is distinctive and fairly easy to recognise, it does not mean that it's easy to understand. Dickinson was well aware that there are some aspects of human experience, whether positive or negative, that are incredibly difficult to capture with words alone. Dickinson challenges the reader through her incision and figurative language to see what she sees and feel what she feels. Before we look at some of Dickinson's poems, let's take a look at some of the themes that you're going to encounter in them. One of the most prominent ideas in both her letters and her poetry is death and the afterlife. As we've heard already, death was an ever present in Dickinson's time and something that came to the young as well as the old. She would have had experience of her peers dying, both family and friends in school, and at one stage, she lived next to a cemetery, which would have been a very busy place indeed. She would have been able to see all the commons and goings and funerals on a daily basis. In one of her letters, she says, "I notice where death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forstall his advances." It seems that the exploration of death in her poetry is actually more a consideration of what comes after death rather than death itself. So sometimes Dickinson has earned a reputation as being morbid, are focused entirely on death and funerals and what happens in funerals. There are references in both "I heard a fly buzz" when I died and I felt a funeral in my brain to the process of dying, so in one poem it's the deathbed and on the other it's the funeral service, but both poems build to the point of the lack of consciousness or sense at the end. In it I heard a fly buzz, the speaker cannot see to see, while in "I felt a funeral in my brain", the speaker finished knowing then. So it's more a focus on what comes after the moment of death. In both of these poems, some of her most famous that deal directly with death, there is a fascination or a fear of that moment, what is coming afterwards. It is the great unknown, we can't know what happens after that point, regardless of what it is that we believe. Now Dickinson had her troubles with religion, faith and God even. She was not as convinced as her other family members were and not as strong in her faith as they were. In her letters she regularly questions God and when she was a girl in school, she was ostracised for not reaffirming her Calvinist faith as other people in the time we're doing, her father included. So what is often described then as her fascination with death could well be more to do with her terror of what happens after death. The act of dying, as described in many of her poems, is a sad reflection of the familiarity she had with death, but no matter how many loved ones are lost, it's impossible to know for certain where they have gone, what happens after they're gone and whether she will ever see them again. Another of Dickinson's more famous themes is one with two sides, hope and despair. Now Dickinson had struggles with her mental health, while it's impossible to know for certain and it's probably even unhelpful to try to diagnose her. There are clear signs that she suffered at times with anxiety and depression or despair. On the flip side, there are also moments of hope, exhilarating hope in some cases and these are often allowed with nature and images from the natural world. This despair in some cases is linked to her fear or uncertainty around the afterlife. In some of her poems such as The Soul has bandaged moments and there's a certain slant of light, we get a sense of the depths of this despair and the long lasting effect of it. We know that people who suffer from depression can often have moments where the depression lifts and they feel relatively normal, but there is always the knowledge that they can go back to that place, that dark place. In a way, they are scarred by their experience. Dickinson explores this particular idea quite well and she also acknowledges the isolation and the loneliness that comes as part of depression or mental illness. Dickinson's isolated herself from most people anyway, so when she had these periods of mental anguish, her sense of loneliness must have been overwhelming. She also captures the numbness that comes with her mental distress and as someone who knows what it feels like when she is in the depths of despair, she celebrates the highs of hope in poems such as Hope is the thing with feathers and paradoxically The Soul has bandaged moments. Even the first line, the use of that word moments hints that there is some reprieve, some release from these difficult times, even if it is brief. The final theme that we'll mention here is much larger than a theme really. Dickinson's use of nature is ever present. She is so in tune with the natural world. Again in her letters it is weaved seamlessly through her experience of the world that it really underpins everything that she says. So when she explores loneliness or despair or hope or happiness or love or pain, even her moments of fun and humour, all of it is done through the lens of the natural world. To capture the idea of hope she uses a bird for example. To communicate the idea of despair she uses the light. Nature is to the fore and other poems like a narrow fellow in the grass and I taste a liquor never brewed. The natural world is something Dickinson has an intimate understanding of and she finds ways to use nature to speak her feelings and concerns. Now we're going to look at each of Dickinson's poems in turn. You will have studied them in great detail in school so I'm going to just give a brief summary and then I'm going to point to some of the more interesting ideas and features that you might mention if you were answering a leaving essay question on Dickinson in your exam. Leaving certain maths doesn't have to be a struggle. With over 500 step by step video lessons, exam style questions and expert marking advice, study clicks boost makes higher and ordinary level maths manageable. Get guided support on algebra, calculus, probability and more, all at a fraction of the cost of grinds. And right now you can get 10 euro off with the code podcast 10. Go to study clicks start that e and start making maths easier today. So the first poem we're going to look at is Hope is the Thing with Fairews. Now this is probably one of the more straightforward of Dickinson's poems. It's often described as a naming or definition poem. Dickinson is trying to pin down and identify what something is in this case Hope. The poem is hopeful in tone and theme. Dickinson uses a metaphor to compare hope to a tiny bird that sings and sings without stopping. Even when times are difficult when there are storms raging and even in the farthest reaches of the world Hope sings. It exists. It's a wonderful thought really that hope cannot be extinguished and the final line too is very hopeful. Hope never asks anything in return. Even in the most dire circumstances it is unconditional. When we examine Dickinson's style here, we see the familiar use of capitalisation on common known such as gale, bird and extremity and we see those dashes throughout. The poem however does not end on a dash giving us a proper sense of closure that Dickinson had something she could say for certain that hope is everlasting. One final note on this poem is that although its subject is hope and it is often referred to as an inspirational poem, there is a hint of a paradox here. In Stanza 1, the speaker says that it never stops. While in Stanza 2 it says "soar must be the storm that could have bashed the little bird". Now the word "abashed" doesn't simply mean to stop or silence someone or something it means to embarrass or shame them as well. So on one hand hope is everlasting. While on the other it can be stopped but only in extreme or sore circumstances. It's also worth remembering that hope itself does not mean the person with it isn't suffering. Having hope can get you through difficult times yes but it doesn't erase the pain. Now the critic Helen Vendelut points to the rhyming in Stanza 2 between the word "storm and the warm" as a clue to this. She calls this rhyming "antithetical" because the words "warm" and "storm" have opposite connotations and she says that this emphasises the paradoxical and uncertain power of hope's tune. The next poem that we're going to look at is "There's a certain slant of light". This poem, in opposition to hope is the thing with feathers, tries to capture that idea of the quality of light being oppressive or creating a sense of dread or despair. The speaker in this poem equates the winter afternoon light to the oppressive nature of religion as represented by the cathedral bells. This may well echo Dickinson's own uncertainties and discomfort with religion and especially the oppressive conservatism of Calvinism. There's a great example of Dickinson's concision in Stanza 2 when she says "heavenly hurt it gives us, we can find no scar but internal difference where the meanings are". In these short lines Dickinson identifies the damage that mental anguish, despair or depression can do without leaving visible scars. What also pointing towards a possible reason for the pain is it born of the mind or is it religion or even god and where does it cause this hurt? Well in the brain or the mind, where the meanings are. This is such a good manipulation of language. The meanings that we create are false. It is through the lens of ourselves and our own experience that we define the world around us. We attach meaning to the world and the things that are in it. So for the heavenly hurt to target that part of us is incredibly destructive because the meanings will be affected too. It changes how we see the entire world. So the despair or depression that is inspired by this certain slant of light affects everything. Non-made teacher as we see in the poem or change it. When it arrives it is total and unreliable. Dessuiting. Despite the description of total despair, there is some hope. The second last line says "when it goes" but that's quickly followed by "tis like the distance on the look of death" perhaps there really isn't so much relief after all. Now this poem is a little different from many of Dickinson's others on the leaving search syllabus because of the meter and the rhyme. Here they have been deliberately changed. We saw previously that Dickinson most commonly wrote in "ballad meter" also known as "common meter". In that meter the first and third lines have eight syllables and four pairs and we call that tetrometer while the second and fourth lines have six syllables and three pairs and we call that trimeter. This meter often creates a sing-song quality which generally suits a poem that is positive such as "hope is the thing with feathers" while it feels less appropriate in a poem like this there's a certain slant of light. Here in the first three stanzas the first and third line of each quattrain have six or seven syllables while the second and fourth lines generally have five. The fourth and final stanzas returns to the full eight syllables or tetrometer for the first and third lines while the second and fourth lines persist with that five syllable line. While this is a smaller maybe an marginal difference in meter it is definitely deliberate and a deliberate choice by a poet is always worth commenting on. So what was Dickinson trying to say or suggest here? Similarly there's a clear rhyme between the second and fourth lines of each stanzas all the way through the poem. Afternoons, tunes, scar, arid, despair, hair, breath, death. While the rhyme is much looser but still present between the first and the third lines we would call it imperfect rhyme and it often connects with one consonant or a ciblant s sound so light heft, us, difference, any affliction and listens distance. Again what is Dickinson trying to communicate or emphasize through this use of imperfect rhyme and dislocated meter? It could very well be that she is trying to give us a sense of the despair and unease that the quality of light she describes in the poem is making her feel. She does this through not giving the listener or the reader what they want that clean easy rhyme and rhythm that we expect from her that we find in her other poems. Now we're going to move on to one of Dickinson's more famous but also more challenging poems. I felt a funeral in my brain. One of the biggest challenges in this poem is that there are so many ways of interpreting or unpacking the dense and concise language that is used. It's clear that some sort of collapse either mental or physical is being described. The opening line is so disconcerting that can someone feel a funeral in their brain. But this word brain in line one is really important. Just like in hope is the thing with feathers where Dickinson tries to pin down or define what hope is. Here she is trying to identify where this suffering she is feeling is located. In line one she says she feels it in her brain in stanza 2 she says it's in her soul while in stanza 3 she says it's her being. This tracks her suffering from being physical to psychological to a total all-encompassing type of suffering. She's headed for total collapse. There is of course also the references to religion through the service and the bells and these could well be hints at her frustration and intolerance of the conservatism of Calvinism. The constant baltering of the congregation about sins and wrongdoing and hell. The metaphor of the funeral itself is extended throughout the poem with the mourners and their footsteps a constant presence. This of course plays up to the Dickinson reputation as being focused on death but it's more a spiritual psychological death that is being explored here. Interestingly when it was published in 1896 the publisher has left out that last stanza altogether preferring the poem to end on the line "rect solitary here". The final stanza underlines the all-encompassing nature of the breakdown that we mentioned a moment ago. Reason has broken and the speaker has plunged into unknowingness. The end of the poem then followed by a dash is abrupt and unsettling and hints at the unknowable nature of the afterlife. In 1896 her editors might have preferred not to have these sorts of questions raised when good Calvinists were supposed to be sure of their own salvation and their ascension to heaven. Dickinson makes clear with her ending here that for her at least those questions and answers are not clear cut. A final point on this poem on the meter. We've seen in some of the poems already that Dickinson can be quite flexible in her meter and rhyme but this poem is rigid in its alternation between tetrometer and trimeter with one exception. That critic Helen Vendor that we mentioned a moment ago when in this poem she identifies this exception as being line five which if it followed the pattern should be tetrometer but instead it is a trimeter as the drum of the service interrupts the narrative. According to Vendor then if Dickinson had not made the meter so insistently percussive we would not feel the funeral that she felt. Now this is yet another example of Dickinson's mastery of language and form and her great skill as a poet. The next poem we're going to look at is a bird came down the walk. A bird came down the walk is one of Dickinson's poems that both personified and defamiliarized nature in order to capture something deeper. In this poem the speaker observes a bird that doesn't know it's being watched. The bird finds a worm and quickly bites it with its beak and swallows it down. He then drinks from a dewdrops steps aside to let a beetle pass and then when the speaker approaches flies away. So what is the deeper thing in this poem then? Well from the perspective of rhyme and meter it's fairly straightforward classic Dickinson regular ballad meter with an A B C B rhyme scheme. The poetic skill comes in the defamiliarization of the bird something most people might encounter every day to make it seem like something almost magical and this defamiliarization is coupled with an exquisite use of metaphor to show us that despite the savagery and primal needs of nature such as a bird devouring a worm without thought or hesitation there is also a rare beauty that is communicated in the final lines as the bird flies away. The metaphor of the bird unrolling his feathers and rolling through the air like a boat rolling across the ocean also makes great use of accidents the repetition of a veil sound. So listen for the old sound repeated in the words rolled, rolled home or as ocean. To soft sound almost emphasizing the beauty of the natural world and then followed by the gentle image of the butterflies playing in the afternoon making no sound plaseless. This poem then counterpoint the savagery of nature with the beauty of it and it's clear which one lasts longer in the memory of the reader for sure in this poem and probably for Dickinson generally beauty wins out. Another of the more famous Dickinson poems I heard of live buzz when I died deals with the moment of death and as we've seen already focuses in on the last moments and that transition from this world into whatever it is that comes afterwards. It's worth remembering that this deathbed scene that is described in the poem is one that Dickinson would unfortunately have been familiar with. She watched over her cousin Sophie Hollander she died when Dickinson was only 14. She also nurseed both her mother and her father in their dying days. This poem then details the final moments of the speaker. In fact the opening line is being delivered from the afterlife whatever or wherever that is. The stillness in the room comes after the body's last struggle for survival and the family's noisy grief. All the interiors have been cried and now there is acceptance both from the family members and the speaker. Now they are all waiting for the king to come. The king here being death the one with ultimate control. There is a delay though in stands of three when the speaker talks about something that seems inconsequential at this point the will and the belongings that have all been assigned to other people and it's at this point that something else entirely inconsequential a fly comes between the speaker and this greatest most monumental of moments. The dying moment. The sense here is I have a really annoying fly that is small but noisy and irritating and for it to come at this moment is almost funny actually if it wasn't such a serious time. We know that Dickinson is interested in the moment of death and the afterlife but here at the moment when we all will pay the ultimate price to find out what's on the other side a fly gets in the way. The fly's blue collar takes over and in the last stanza and as the speaker's eyes fail all they can hear is the buzz of the fly and it totally has been said that the hearing is the last of the senses to go in death that sometimes people who are on the cost of death can still hear their loved ones but in this case it's not loved ones that are heard it is that un-amata-peer buzz of a fly. This poem is normalizing death it takes the gravity out of the situation the seriousness and some ways it's actually blasphemous at that moment when the speaker is supposed to meet their maker as the Calvinist tradition that she grew up but would suggest she sees a fly instead that most inconsequential of creatures and it is this fly not God that dominates this poem from the very first line to the end. The next poem that we're going to look at is the soul has bandaged moments. To understand this poem it's also important to understand the genre of Gothic horror. Dickinson is borrowing from a very recognizable set of stereotypes here the female prisoner the ugly or villainous goblin and the sense of dread or horror at what might happen to her there's a particular and deliberate sense that she may be violated in some way. some way by this goblin. Now these tropes would have been instantly recognizable to Dickinson and contemporary readers who would have been familiar with Gothic horror stories, but Dickinson subverts this genre and internalizes it to make it about mental anguish that is suffered. So the suffering here is internal, it is not coming from some external source. The soul is personified as the female victim that has been captured and imprisoned by a goblin. The female victim is approached by something ghastly that turns out to be a goblin creature. The soul is being approached by anxiety or depression. There is of course moments where the soul escapes and is free and joyous, but we see that these moments are just that, moments. The soul, like the woman, is recaptured once again and we are led to understand that this pattern will repeat itself. There is some hope inherent in the poem as we see the vulnerability of the soul. Perhaps Dickinson was trying to show us how vulnerable we are at a non-physical suffering, such as depression and anxiety. The fact that there are moments of both suffering and ecstasy shows us that it's not total despair or overwhelming depression. There is a way out, even if it's just for a while. It's interesting too to note the divergence from her usual meter in stanza form here. There is a cesset, six line stanza and a couplet. There's two lines at the end. It's not just quaterines. When we examine where we get the extra lines in the cesset, for example, we see that it comes after the recognition that that goblin has had an effect on her. These two lines to extend the quaterine to a cesset are almost like an apology, that she feels some sort of shame that she is allowed herself to succumb to the goblin. In reality, shame that she is given into depression or anxiety. That's quite a modern idea, maybe not so much modern as right now, but 20, 30 years ago, this idea of mental illness being something that people were ashamed of, embarrassed of, people being told to pull themselves together and to get on with things. There is a sense of that shame here in those extra lines that she attaches to that quaterine. And similarly, in the last stanza, we're missing two lines. There are only two lines there, whereas we expect quaterines from Dickinson. We feel that there should be a more final sense of closure, but we're not given any such comfort. These lines really emphasise the despair felt. Those words, the horror welcomes her again. There is no escape, and the deviation from her usual meter and form underlines that fact. The next poem that we're going to look at is, "I could bring you jewels had I a mind to." This poem, "I could bring you jewels had I a mind to," is quite playful, and a welcome respite, I'm sure, from some of Dickinson's darker, more challenging poems. The poem was sent to Dickinson's brother's wife, Susan Gilbert, so Dickinson's sister-in-law. Although the two live next door to one another, they wrote to each other extensively. There is a very close relationship. Here, the speaker is saying that gift-giving is only really meaningful and true if the gift has special resonance with both the giver and the receiver. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker says, "They could bring this person all sorts of rare jewels, perfumes, colors, foodstuffs. The places mentioned are all exotic." Bearing in mind that Dickinson barely left her room, let alone her tone, going to the Bahamas or a Sandemingle would be like going to another planet for her. She says that she could bring all of these things, but what would really suit her to give as a gift is a little flower. And it was a particular type of wildflower, a common in New England, something she would probably have been able to see from her window, called the jewelweed. It has tiny orange and yellow flowers with red spots, and Dickinson actually enclosed one of these flowers with the poem that she sent to Susan Gilbert. She says that these flowers suit me more than all the exotic things previously mentioned, and they would even suit as a dairy for Babadillo a 16th century Spanish conquistador/governor and one of the richest men who ever lived. The humour here is evident in that she is describing the value of this flower, and then she seems to imply that this image of the little blaze flickering to itself in the middle is actually a metaphor for herself. Now in fairness to Dickinson, a woman who wrote "incredible poetry" in near total obscurity, it is actually a very fitting symbol for her, a little blaze flickering to itself in the middle. The next poem that we're going to look at is a narrow fellow in the grass. For a poem that seemingly reveals little about its author, a narrow fellow in the grass can be interpreted in a wide number of ways. So the speaker here is male, a boy at the beginning, and this is something Dickinson has done on a number of occasions in a number of different poems, using a male speaker gives Dickinson freedom that a girl would not have enjoyed, so for example the ability to go around barefoot for one. The speaker describes a snake in the grass. They always appear suddenly, he says, and can usually only be detected from their effect on their surroundings, like the grass separating as it travels through. They're slippery customers and they're hard to pin down. Now this boy knows the snake and knows what sort of ground they prefer, the buggy acre. So this in theory should make him safe from snakes because he knows where they're going to be, but he goes on to say that they can actually appear anywhere and sometimes they are disguised. He tells of an experience that has happened more than once when out in the fields, he thinks he sees a whiplash lying curled up on the ground, and when he goes to reach for it, he suddenly realizes that it's a snake and it slithers away and fright. Now some of the language used to describe the snake as it wrinkles, and just wonderful making something that is apparent to a lot of people, really, really vivid and vibrant. It moves in the way that, just in the way that Dickinson has described. So the first 16 lines are narrated by a boy, but the last eight lines suddenly feel different and they feel like an adult speaker. So this adult is saying that they like nature and they get on with many of nature's creatures, but since his boyhood, he's never met a snake without experiencing a tightness in his chest and zero at the bone. Now this phrase zero at the bone is an example of how challenging Dickinson's writing can be. There really is no way to translate that phrase. It's a feeling captured in words, but it's a feeling that if you have felt that then you know what she means. It's a shutter, a total involuntary shutter. It's that moment when you realize that something is on you or in your hair or you've nearly stepped on something and it's that moment just after the realization and you simply react. So it's a combination of revulsion, disgust, fear, adrenaline and it really is an excellent way of capturing that sensation, zero at the bone. I finally note on this poem brings me back to what I said at the beginning about multiple interpretations. While many people take this poem to be about evil or the devil using the image of the serpent as a representation of supreme malevolence maybe, I actually get the sense that this poem could be about anyone, especially anyone that you might describe as a snake in the grass, or even just a bit poison as snakes. So this was one of the few poems that Dickinson published in her lifetime. So although the editor is the Republican, that was the magazine that had appeared in, they changed her punctuation in line three and she said that the poem had been robbed from her, but the fact that she allowed publication, which meant that people would read it and they could read into it, it's safe to assume that she knew that nothing could be read into this. So maybe it is just a poem about snakes and to be careful of them. The next poem that we're going to look at is "I taste a liquor never brood". It's another of the few that were published in Dickinson's lifetime. The central metaphor in this poem is one of drunkenness, which is ironic considering the time and the time that Dickinson grew up in. The puret and Christian movement of which her family were apart rejected alcohol and encouraged abstinence. This poem then can be seen to be poking fun at the temperance movement and revealing Dickinson's own playful side as well as her views on the puret and values of her family and that her tone is posed. In the poem, it's summertime and the speaker is ecstatic. This ecstasy is not caused by drunkenness or alcohol because the speaker has tasted a liquor never brood. The last line of stands of one emphasizes this, the happiness that the speaker feels could not be equaled by drinking wine from the rine, a famous wine region in Germany. The extended metaphor continues where bees are being thrown out of pubs for being drunk, butterflies are swearing their leverage drink again and the speaker says that they will continue to drink more. The speaker is continually travelling upwards, getting higher if you will, until eventually they are in heaven with the angels and saints. Here perhaps Dickinson is being deliberately sarcastic. Religion and following a religion's rules are supposed to bring you closer to God, but the speaker in this poem is ascending to heaven through overindulgence and going against the puret and ways. The final image of the tipler or the drinker, leaning against the sun is reminiscent of a drunk leaning against a lamp post trying to steady themselves. This poem is a great example of Dickinson's playful nature as well as her rebellious sight. Now the last poem that we're going to look at is after a great pain of form of feeling comes. Now this poem is in my opinion one of the best of Dickinson's that is on the leaving side syllabus. The poem deals with the aftermath of great emotional pain. The speaker describes the stiff heart that is immobile. It's incapable of any more feeling. The feet move, but it's a mechanical motion without feeling or attention. The feet aren't even fully aware of what it is that they're walking on. There is some confusion in the speaker too. They appear to be mistaking this numbness for contentment. It's a numbness that is described here as a form of feeling. Now, formal means something done in accordance with rules, convention or etiquette, and this opens up quite a number of possible interpretations for us. We saw on a previous part of the podcast that Dickinson's use of ballad meter, tetrameter, alternated with trimeter, was a big change from the way poetry was traditionally written. The traditional or formal way poetry was written up to this point was using Ayambu parameter, like Shakespeare or William Wordsworth. Dickinson, in this poem, starts off writing exactly in that meter, that traditional old fashioned meter. The first stanza is written in perfect Ayambu pentameter. The last two lines of the poem are also written in Ayambu pentameter. In between, however, in lines 5 to 9, there is chaos. The meter falls apart and looks ragged and all over the place. The critic Helen Vendler says that the formal feeling felt after the great pain seems to be impacting on the order of the poem itself. The formality that that person who has suffered is feeling is being reflected in the lines on the page. There is a sense of numbness in the poem following that great pain, but also that the speaker is expected to put on a brave face, that they go through the motions. Vendler argues that it is the tension between inner desperation and outer compliance that generates the ragged middle of this poem. The last stanza offers some qualified hope. We're told that this is the hour of lead. This connects the images of stone and quartz, all heavy, dull, lifeless materials, but it's an hour, suggesting hopefully that it will not last forever. In line 11, offers further hope, albeit not really a pleasant one, if you're able to survive this form of feeling this great pain, then you will remember it. Just like people who very nearly froze to death remember their ordeal, they remember it as colonists, colonists, nearsenselessness, and then rescue or alternatively death. If we take the lead and goal that last part of the poem to mean death, then the speaker is remembering the experience from beyond life somewhere in the afterlife, just like the speaker in I heard a fly buzz. This brings special resonance to that word if in the line remembered if outlived. The speaker may not survive this great pain, because one of the bleaker of Dickinson's poems, but it does capture something of her spirit and her intense skill as a poet. Now, I hope that you found this podcast useful. I really hope that you've gotten something from our exploration of the poems and Dickinson's style and her background. If you are looking for any other resources or videos on the leaving service, please check out my channel on YouTube and I hope to talk to you again soon. If you are serious about your exams, StudyClick's Premium is the best way to study. You'll get access to every exam question by topic, American schemes and solutions, plus exclusive mock exam questions and papers. No more scrambling for the right questions, just structured exam-ready prep. And for podcast listeners, here's ten euro off with this called Podcast 10 at checkout. Go to studyclicks.ie and get your off grade today.