Literatura 1850 - 1900. Emily Dickinson., Apuntes de Literatura Americana

¡Descarga Literatura 1850 - 1900. Emily Dickinson. y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura Americana solo en Docsity! 13/2/2020 EMILY DICKINSON (1830 - 1886) Who is Emily Dickinson? La Belle of Amherst & the recluse poet Biography and death (names of places & people uploaded in a document to Campus Virtual’) Poetic style: - The American difference, epigrammatic/ paradoxical/elliptical poetry - Punctuation: the dashes - Irregular meter & dashes: common meter, iambic tetrameter & iambic trimeter - Rhyming pattern in 4 line stanzas: ABAB or _A_A. Slant Rhyme - Who’s the speaker & the addresee? The Circumference, theological rebel Tensions of the self as a woman poet. Poems - ‘This is my letter to the World’ - ‘I’m nobody ‘Who are you?’’ Tensions of the self as a woman poet. Poems - ‘This is my letter to the World’ - ‘I’m nobody ‘Who are you?’’ Who is Emily Dickinson? La Belle of Amherst & the recluse poet Emily Dickinson is called ​‘La Belle of Amherst’. ​Amherst is her native town in Massachusetts, New England. She is also an eternal girl, a woman who did not want to grow up and did not get married. She decided to stay at her father’s house during all her life. She is also called ​‘The Virgin Recluse’ ​who locked herself up in her room to write. And she is also known as the lonely ghost because she woke up in the middle of the night to write. She avoided social interaction. She is also the ‘​Women in White’ or ‘the ​Bright Imperpetua’​, the woman who was always dressed in white. The woman who never got married. She called herself the ‘​Empress of Calvary’ ​in one of her poems, because she considered that her life was an agony but she remains majestic as a queen. Why? There are many speculation but the most likely one is that she got broken heart when her female friends abandon her when they got married. Finally, she is also called the ‘​Madame of Sad’​, because she lived a sexless and quiet life but it will be compensated by the violence and the erotic desire that are represented in her poems. She is simultaneously all of these women but at the same time she is none of them, because she remains as an enigma. She is an unknown woman. We don’t know about her life. It is a myth of American literature. She is one of the founders of American poetry and she is the best female poet of the US in the 19th century thanks to her innovative, experimental and original poetry. Her poetry anticipate modernism. She is considered a pre-modernist poet. In addition, Emily is crowned to be a part of the universal literature. She is an isolated poet because she does not have anything in common with other of her contemporary poets; she is unique and isolated poet. Not only that, she rejected the male poetic and literary traditions. Individuality (she is unique) and her self-confidence (she trust on the power of her imagination) define her as a poet. She decided not to published her poetry because she thought that she was not going to be appreciated by her contemporaries. Her poetry generally deals with the universal themes in literature: ​love​, ​nature​ and ​death. ​ She also develops other themes. Biography and death (names of places & people uploaded in a document to Campus Virtual’) Emily Dickinson was born on 11-12-1830 in a house called the ​Homestead built by her father in Amherst (Massachusetts, New England). She stayed all her life in this house till her death in 1886. During this 50 years of life, her artistic achievement as a poet went further away from this rural house in Massachusetts, to become immortal. (Massachusetts is the place where puritans come to an end and american literature is born.) Emily lived a life of economic privilege. Her family was wealthy. Her father was Edward Dickinson who worked as a Congressman and as a lawyer. She spent a very happy childhood with her brother Austin and her sister Lavinia. Emily was an excellent student who received a good education in the Amhert’s academy. She spent 1 year away from home in a boarding school. After completing her education she went to ‘​Man Holion Female Seminaar’​, but she returned after a year. The real cause of her returning and not completing her formal education was because she refused to stand in front of a class and declare that she was a professing Christian (she had doubts about her faith). During her life she did not trust tradicional religious church faith. She also refused to be a church membership which created conflict with her family. For linguists, in her poetry we often find grammatical elitions. There are often no endings for verbs and nouns or the omission of the auxiliary verb. Even the syntax is very irregular; (i.e) inversion of phrase order. There are also enjoyable moments, you break the verse from one . She also uses vernacular/colloquial language which is something very American. Paradoxical poetry. The consequence of this is that her poems became very obscure. She brakes with poetic conventions.. She does not use titles and she capitalizes some words, to give more emphasis. - Punctuation​: she doesn’t like to use commas, interrogation marks, columns, periods...In addition, she does not use the proper punctuation. Instead, she uses dashes between phrases or words. The interpretation of these dashers is unknown. But it can be the expression of hesitation, doubts, make pauses or express graphically a missing word. A dash at the end of the poem may mean a continuity or a sense of infinity. The dashes are an invitation for us to read her own conclusions. Metric and rhyme She commonly uses a common meter for church songs and hymns. Iambic pentameter: each line, 5 feets (silaba sin acentuar mas silaba acentuada). Insead she chooses the alternation between the iambic tetrameter and the trimeter. 4 feet followed by 3 feet in the following line. (ABAB) ir _A_A. She usually writes in 4 lines stanzas. Common meter, but not always. Slant rhyme is imperfect or assonant rhyme. She chooses similar but not identical sounds. For instance, queen and afternoon. In terms of the speaker, she expressed that when she says ‘I’, it means ‘a supposed person’ so she explains that the intention of her poem is to represent the universal experiences and emotions to go beyond her own self. The speaker in the poem sometimes is a child, a gun (an object), a man, a wife, an empress, a dying woman, a corpse, a bird… Different characters. The addressee is not clear either because she uses impersonal pronouns. In a letter, Emily Dickinson declares the Bible as the only authority is the centre (nucleus) of the circumference. In another letter, declares that ‘her business is the circumference’. She prefers the area that separates the individual from God. The centre can be understood as the sun, the male . She prefers the periphery as a woman writer. She is a theological rebel, a woman who struggles with her christian faith. She is a poet but she is also a thinker. Her poems reflect her thoughts about life, death, nature... Emily Dickinson represents the interior of american life. She is the poet of the soul. She concludes that there are no final questions of the things that matter, there is only speculation. Especially in religion. She cannot find evidence of the existence of God or the afterlife. - ‘​This is my letter to the World’ She addresses the world to her letter: her poetry. Her poems are her letter to the world which contains her message from nature. Nature is described as maternal, majestic and external. She, the poet, is the one who delivers the message from nature. She, as a messenger, has been chosen by nature. She declares her mission in life, to deliver the message from nature, the influence of transcendentalism. She feels that she has been neglected because she has not received anything from the world. However she still has the ambition of fame and literary recognition. She cannot see the hands of her readers, because she does not trust contemporary readers. She is a visionary. ‘Hands I cannot see’. She anticipates that she will be admired in the future. She hopes that American in the future will appreciate her poetry in the future. She is the messenger who sent us the massage of nature. She asks for sympathy and benevolence. - ‘I’m Nobody ‘Who are you’? Very short and simple. Here the speaker (Emmily or not) addresses a listener with one question: ‘Who are you?’. The poem is going to discuss the difference between being somebody and nobody. She chooses the personality of a child to give voice to the poem . For the child, it is better to be somebody than nobody, because you are ignored by everyone and that way enjoy your private life. In contrast, when you are somebody, you are self-centered and you are admired by vulgar crowds (admiring bog: pejorative word to refer to poor catholic Irish). The speaker is going to compare the public life of being somebody with a frog croaking with a swan, who is nobody. To be nobody also means to be an unmarried woman and in those times, it means having no identity at all. She is also nobody because she is a woman who does not publish her work. She is socially nobody. She does not advertise. 14/2/2020 EMILY DICKINSON’s poem on NATURE Introduction. Gardening & knowledge on science, two faces of (human) nature ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ ‘A-still-volcano- life’ ‘A spider sewed at night’ ‘A bee his Burnished Carriage’ ‘A narrow fellow inthe Grass’ ‘Over the fence’ ‘A bird come down the wall’ ‘A wounded deer-leaps highest’ ‘Good Morning- Midnight’ EMILY DICKINSON’s poems on NATURE Introduction. Gardening & knowledge on science, two faces of (human) nature Since childhood Emily Dickinson has admired nature. Her education in Ahmers was focused on science and she was to do empirical observation, which leads her to have a valuable knowledge on botany, geology, human anatomy and natural history. This will be reflected in her poems with accurate description of nature. Especially plants, trees and little animals. She also writes about weather phenomena, minerals, the dark of the night, the light during the day… Two things were sacred for her: friendship and nature. She had a herbarium. She understood that plants were individuals and have individual self. She spent more time with them than with people. She sent baskets of flowers to her friends but what she mostly did was letters to her female friends containing flowers and poems. Here there is an analogy between the beauty of a poem and the beauty of a flower. A poem is a flower, a flower is a poem. Here we find the influence of Transcendentalism. What is important for this theory is the power of the eyes to observe nature. You observe nature to reach truth about yourself and the world around you. Your mind has the power to connect your spiritual life with nature. Emily Dickinson uses nature to express her inner self. Seeing in nature is the only way to find answers about life and religion, including God. Nature is God's manifestation on Earth. Nature (also God) has 2 faces. If nature has two faces, God is also good. Nature can be good, it can offer pleasure. You can enjoy the pleasure of God, too. Nature has also a violent side and is indifferent to human pain, as well as God. Correlation between nature and the way we are. Humans also have two faces. Trinity: God, nature and the human being. Nature has its alternation between tenderness and the good side and the aggressive face. Emily Dick. acknowledge that she also has two faces. She is like a garden or flowers (sweet, tender, domestic) , but she also like a volcano (violent emotions, savage, creativity). Garden vs the volcano. The speaker who identifies herself in the poems personifies tiny creatures like herself. In contrast, men are aggressors , predators or seducers like a hunter. There are also bees, which represent women who are trying to find flowers (women). She tries to look for beauty and wisdom through the observation of nature. ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ P. 207 I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped in Pearl – Not all the Frankfort Berries Yield such an Alcohol! Inebriate of air – am I – She admires spiders. She identified herself with them. The spider here is an artist. This is a self portrait of the poet. Both artists work (spiders and Emily) at night. There is no light during the night to write, but there is the light of muses to write. Both, the spider and herself create an ​‘arc of white’​. What they create is meant to last, to remain there for a long period of time. The white filament of the spider web as well as the literature work of Emily. They do not need direction or guidance, they are autonomous. The spider creates his web and the poet/ writer writes a poem that usually has two topics: love and death, since the spider is a male and creates something for a lady. The spider is a male and the poet. Shroud (sudarium) of Gnome. ​The spider creates loves and death like the universal topics of any poet. Identification between the spider and the poet. Both want want to create immorality with their works, whether the web or the poet. The strategy of the spider is physiognomy, which is the art of finding out the personality of someone by observing his physical features. The outside reveals the inside. This is the strategy to reach immortality. What it is not visible in the poet. Women in the 19th century were compared to spiders because they were dedicated to the activity of sew. Specially certain women of a certain age, the solteronas. Connection between spinsters and spiders. Both are disgusting for men. But the spider is a he. The myth of Arachne who challenges a Goddess… Why can he be a he? Traditionally the artist has been a male. The other possibility is that a woman has to be hidden in a ale to become an artist. The more clear explanation is that she is playful. She likes to challenge your expectations. P. 1096 A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides - You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is - The Grass divides as with a Comb, A spotted Shaft is seen, And then it closes at your Feet And opens further on - He likes a Boggy Acre - A Floor too cool for Corn - But when a Boy and Barefoot I more than once at Noon Have passed I thought a Whip Lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled And was gone - Several of Nature’s People I know, and they know me I feel for them a transport Of Cordiality But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And Zero at the Bone. It is a snake, the narrow fellow. It is a person, an antrophomormic creature. Description of the movement of a snake by the alliteration of the ‘s’ sound. The snake rides very fast. Kinesthesia: images that provide the sense of movement. The speaker is a boy who refers to his childhood memories when he could run barefoot. The snake suddenly appears to the speaker but also it soon disappears. The snake does not fear / threaten the speaker. You feel vulnerable when the snake is around. Zero at the bone: inside. This is a very powerful image of fear. Penetrating coldness of fear. It is a representation of a man who have abandon paradise. The snake did not threaten the speaker. We are suspicious about it because it is hidden. We have an irrational fear but you fear zero at the bone when you see a snake. P. 271 Over the fence Strawberries—grow Over the fence I could climb—if I tried, I know Berries are nice! But—if I stained my Apron God would certainly scold! Oh, dear,—I guess if He were a Boy He'd—climb—if He could! Childish poem about a girl who picks up strawberries from nature. It is not a permitted activity for girl. Here, we have the presence of the Bible. The tentation of the fruit, but it is a forbiden fruit for girls because they are over the hence. Association with the first sin. Strawberries are not easily. The fence is an obstacle for the girls. There is an obstacle moral girls have delantales so she cannot climb up the fence por miedo a mancharse (stain of berries represent the stain of sexual act) Emily says that boys are not afraid of picking up berries. There is no . Metaphor for writing, biy can write, Girls can do it physically but morally not. She tells us that Boys and God are not afraid to pick them up and can sin unlike girls. Also a metaphor for writing girls cannot have access to writing but God wrote the Bible and literature is a male tradition. P. 359 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, plashless as they swim. The speaker is a very good observer who describes the different moments of a bird. At the beginning we see a criminal. The bird acts as if nobody is seeing him but he is committing a crime. He is going to warm it a warm. The speaker is afraid of the bird. Comical that a human is afraid of a bird to avoid that the bird bites you. She offers bread The bird can also be kind as a creature. She sees other faces of the bird, of nature. The bird drinks then due from the water. Then, it does not kill the escarabajo. We see a delicate creature. The bird is also scared of the human too. Later, the speaker is going to see the bird in its natural element: the air. The speaker admires the capacity of flying in the sky, which is compared with butterflies swimming. She compares it also with men remando en el rio. Simplicity for the bird to fly and making no sound. The horrible aspect of the bird at the beginning is compensated with the beauty at the end of the poem. BEauty in nature has the last word. - A wounded deer A wounded deer - leaps highest I've heard the hunter tell; 'Tis but the ecstasy of death, 1. School mates: Ed 2. Old friend Elizabeth 3. Her sister in love: susan 4. Another friend: Kate Emily Dickinson was heartbroken every time her female friends left her because they got married. Since the 1870’s she decided to dress in white. ‘The White Imprepetua’ to be married but marriage was never consummated. She is married to her poetry. To be always a virgin. The colour white represents the powerful of nature. Also the snow is white. The dress of nature. It is also associated with the ‘​white heat​’ (incandescencia). Emily dickinson is at white heat. The white dress allows us to understand the split of different characters in her poems (different women dressed in white). - ‘My life has stood - a Loaded Gun’ ​- ​feminist reading P. 764 My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - In Corners - till a Day The Owner passed - identified - And carried Me away - And now We roam in Sovreign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - And every time I speak for Him The Mountains straight reply - And do I smile, such cordial light Opon the Valley glow - It is as a Vesuvian face Had let it’s pleasure through - And when at Night - Our good Day done - I guard My Master’s Head - ’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s Deep Pillow - to have shared - To foe of His - I’m deadly foe - None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without - the power to die - The nucleus of the poem is omitted. She does not give crucial information. According to feminist scholars, the poem is about the danger of being possessed by the daemon. On it poem, we find a love triangle: the gun (the speaker), the hunter and a doe (female deer). Love triangle between her brother Austin, her wife and Emily who was in love with Susan, her sister-in-law. When you are a woman and you have knowledge (the possession of the daemon) you have the power to kill. Once you have experienced the power that the daemon has given you . Another version of the idea that encloses this poem is the frustration of a woman artist in the US. The speaker becomes into a gun (It), the woman is loaded with creativity. The gun is about to explode her creativity but it controls it because of the social pressure against women creativity, It can kill patriarchal order.She rejects the social conventions in the 19th century. However, this woman-gun is owned by a man (hunter) who can be the father or the brother. It condemned the gun to inactivity who remained loaded because the man forbids it to create. This is a waste of a great potential. The gun is obedient and both go hunting together in the woods. She is obedient to his authority. There is also friendship between the speaker and the owner because they hunt together. The doe is a symbol of female passivity and woman being a victim (being hunted). The doe can reflect the homoerotoc desire ot the speaker. The doe also represent the act of writing, the poetic production, The effect of guns in nature is the creation of an echo in the mountains. It has a vesuvian power. The last stanza of the poem represents an identification between the death. The speaker has the power to kill but not the power to die because as a poet, your poetry makes you immortal. In contrast, the man, the hunter, has the power to die. - ‘I have been hungry all the years’ ​- Sexual thirst and emotional hunger. The poem is about abundant food and drink. This is also a poem about starvation. It is a narration of past events. Finally, this speaker has dinner. This experience, after having dinner is. The poem represents the cult of the thin women in the XIX that was considered the idea of beauty and the morality in not eating. Eating food means having sex and the renunciation of sex and lce means the renunciation of food and drink. She acts like a beggar, pressing the nose against the windows. The writer identities of speaker is defined by hunger and starvation which she compares herself with a bird who eat crumbs. The speaker remains on the behaviour of an anorexic women (alternation of time with no appetite and starvation). Sex and love hurts the same as when you have consumed food and you feel plenty full. The last line “The entering - takes away” it is better to resist, to gain means to lose: ​better to desire than to experience.​It is better to be hungry than eating. It is better sexual desire, than having this someone or something. To have sex means to loose. The experience of eating or having sex disappoints you. when you drink the wine of infatuation, then you lose desire and it hurts. Hunger means that you envy other people. - ‘Wild nights, wild nights!’ Celebrates love and a sexual encounter between “It” (as we do not know the speaker) and the lover. Sexual passion associated to navigation to express erotic desire, she uses Eden which means the path to sexual consummation. The night, the wind and the sea are the elements towards the physical love, the sea is turbulent and the erotic fantasy is not compass. you are capable of rowing to Eden without a compass. The Eden is a port which is quiet and the conditional expressions mean it is a fantasy “might, were I, should…” she wants a sexual climax but cannot afford it. It cannot be materialised, the ambiguity in gender, we do not know if the speaker is male or female. she transforms herself into a male to experience a female addressee or maybe the “I” is a she and is attracted to the “You” that is female. The woman is the harbour, is the cavity, to motor inside the port. if it was a female she can have a rest in the harbour. ​Sexual fantasy. - ‘Her breast is fit for pearls’ ​+ ​‘her face was in a bed of love’ The speaker finds sexual desire with a woman, Freud considered that homosexuality is bad and female homosexuality is to embrace the pleasure of the clitoris. Women according to him suffer from the castration complex and Lacan says that beyond the penis there is sexual pleasure and is of the clitoris. Women know about it, if you experience it you believe it. Paula Bennett and her clitorocentric criticism, she thinks Dickinson could not write about women sexual pleasure as it was forbidden but her poems contain elements as tiny pearls, birds, flowers, peas, jewels and for her is the symbol of oral sexuality or clitoris. She knew about the genitals of the human body and what matters is what we feel when we read her poems, and it was to demonstrate her hidden homoerotic desire. - P. 121. She is not the male diver, as the sperm in a vagina dives. The Female speaker has a rival, the crest = cock. The male rival is physically superior because he can give more pleasure to the female lover, she transforms herself into a bird and cannot give the sexual climax for the woman. However, she can build a nest in the breast of the Female lover, a home for her beloved. Two women can be perfect lovers, without the vagina penetration and necessity of a diver. (according to clitorocentric criticism). - P. 1775 The tongue and the hands generate oral sexual pleasure, flowers associated to genitals and the bed of hair pubic hair. The sperm with sacred light has the opportunity to create but she claims that is better to feel lesbian sex. Lacan admits that once you experience the clitoral sex is better than vaginal sex, you do not believe in it until you believe it “Who hears May be incredulous, who witnesses, believes”. concepts (love, hope, truth…). She treats abstracts concepts using visual objects. She uses her own experiences to represent what it is human. She also tries to understand universal questions in life (where is the afterlife). She also wanted to distrust the information from the outside, from man and religion..She doesn't what to accept what we have been thought. She is a free and critical thinker. She tries to render her own life to understand what it is to be human. When she has in mind the soul, she understands it as a dynamic entity. It changes and evolves, with different moods. Her poetry is mindstate. Her poetry is also called psychological introspection. She is also the poet of psychic extremity. She is going to describe the emotions that other writers avoid to write about. Her inner self was passionate despite her life not having too many events. She experienced a wide range of emotions. Sometimes what we discovered in her poem are her traumas and mental breakdown. When you have felt so much, to feel nothing (emotional numbness). She believed that suffering is part of life because they contribute to our mental growth. - ‘Hope is a thing with Feathers’​ - definition poem She used visual images to define abstract concepts like hope. She states in this poem that hope is a thing with feathers, like birds. A bird has the capability to sing songs without words. Birds use only emotional melody. The birds are always singing like hope. It rather means that the song of the bird, that hope is an independent force independent from the human soul. It is an independent entity. Hope a is transitory human feeling. Hope does not live in our soul and it can abandon our body. When we experience the storm of human suffering or turbulence emotions is when hope gives us more comfort. Hope does not ask for nothing in return. She identifies herself in the poem with the bird The bird sings songs while the poet write poems - ‘Success is a counted sweetest’​ ​aphorism Aphorism is to reveal a truth in a very concise way. The speaker is going to defend that those who never succeed are the ones who understand what success is. It is the impossibility of . It is the lack of something that teaches us the value and the importance of this thing we do not have. She uses a metaphor; a person: the fallen soul of a soldier. She uses images from the battle. Here we have the defeated soul that understands what victory means. Losing something is bigger than winning something. If you do not enjoy victory, then you are losing victory . When you lose you win. The desire of victory of the dying soldier is superior to the satisfaction of victory from the winning soldiers. Suffering ennobles the suffering. To desire something although you fail, makes you - ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ - ​aphorism It is a poem about how to write a poem, a metapoem. You have to tell the truth without damaging people. She is also giving you the definition of truth; light. The problem with truth and light is that both can blind us, so we have to tell the truth indirectly. Truth needs to be revealed gradually. She uses the images of children who are afraid of storms and lightning (symbol of truth). Parents try to comfort their children. Dickinson as a poet feels that she must protect the readers from the bright light of truth when she writes. It must be explained with allegories to surprise us and to produce light and knowledge. Tell the truth with an attenuated light. How you tell the truth and how to write a poem - main themes - ‘I dwell in Possibility’ She defines the house of poetry and the house of prose and the prose and cons of each one. Prose is defined as the natural language of everyday life but it becomes a prison. It can be a bigger house because you can use words in many different houses. In contrast poetry is the house of possibilities which has more windows and doors. Also, light and knowledge comes in through windows and doors. The house of poetry is more beautiful. Its location is in the sky, the house of nature. According to Christians cedars are the trees of God (nature). The house of poetry can have visitors; us the readers. This is a happy poem that tells us that poetry gives us more freedom and creativity than prose. For her, writing poetry for her is sublime beauty - ‘Dare you see a soul at the White heat’?​ - the blacksmith’s forge The poem starts with a question and it makes an invitation to visit a place, using a metaphor ‘the Blacksmith forge’. The white heat is the temperature that is higher than the red heat (fire) and minerals and metals become incandescent, they emit a light that is white. The poem is going to contrast the white and the red heat. You first reach the latter one and then the first one. Red and flesh is blood. White represents purity and salvation. When the poet writes, she is able to reach the white heat. We as readers are entering in a blacksmith force where the blacksmith is working with minerals and uses his minerals to work on them. The soul is compare with ore. Both are going to undergo a spiritual process in the forge to reach the white fireheart for the mineral and soul. This fire that is red is going to be defeated later by the light that is white. First the mineral become red and then a colorless light appear. The white heat .. ? an ​unwanted places is not to be consecrated’ which means not to be purified by God. This white heat comes from the autonomous human soul. The white heat represent the literary genius of human life. The soul experience is red (pain). You cannot reach the white light if you are a winner. The intend passion can be - ‘The heart asks Pleasure - first’ The human heart has priorities. Priority number one is pleasure. First pleasure, then not to feel pain. Painkillers reduce the pain and induce us to sleep. If the painkillers are denied to us, we choose death. We have the image of God in the poem ‘Inquisitor’, she is a Puritan writer, inquisition belongs to catholicism. A good way to attract catholicism is to reflect God as an Inquisitor as a powerful torturer and we do not have the choice to die because it is in God's hands. Therefore, the heart becomes a beggar asking for mercy not to suffer. - ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’​ - ​the anatomy of pain and catatonia Emily Dickinson is an expert in the anatomy of pain, emotional numbness or catatonia experienced after a great pain ( a physical illness or emotional breakdown). You experience emotional death. You clinically remember the suffering and the terror of having felt physical or emotional pain. She compares our states of emotional numbness with minerals. tombs represent death and eternity. After experiencing a great pain you enter into a eternal and condemned to eternal suffering. There is a lack of connection between the body and the mind. Your body is heavy compared with stones. You do not feel sensations other than heaviness. You are indifferent to everything. This is the time when suicide can come. ‘The hour of lead’, the hour when the heavy is too burden, when you cannot continue, the hour when you decide to kill yourself. Mental death, the lead crosses you. You are mentally death, suicide. - ‘The soul has bandaged moments’ ​- ​the gothic The soul is personified as a woman in love. This is a woman that has been wounded by her lover. The soul is bleeding ​and the woman needs the bandage, suspicion of infidelity a woman consumed by fear. The female soul is in pain, she is freezing in pain. She is a prisoner of fright. In the second part of the poem, the soul is temporarily liberated from fright and experiences explosive joy. Her soul dances like a bomb. She experiences happiness, but she is mentally inestable, that is why she is like a bomb, with a potential force to explode. Your explotion can harm others, you become unpredictable. She a woman becomes a He who is a Bee that is happy to have freedom of going from one rose to other. Confirmation that the man goes with her and when touching liberty and going to other people. In the last two stanza we have her being a prisoner, fright has returned to her and she is the prisoner of this personification which means because you are afraid and you know you are betrayed you are a prisoner because you cannot escape from your prisión and fright (your captor). Shackles on the feet, the soul has returned to the Bandaged moments of the pain. (Death is not mentioned, attempt to understand the personal experience with death to make it universal.                                Two people the speaker has loved died so your life closes twice and means that you also die before your                                        physical death. She suffers emotional death because of the death of two beloved people. Before you die the                                    church Tells you that there are only two possible ways to close your eyes: salvation and damnation. But still                                      there is a third possibility: immortality. She believes that there are not just two options and yet remains to                                      see the importance of the eyes not what church says and she support the option of immortality. She uses the                                        words “parting” we only know What we leave and is effortless and hopeless to think about heaven and hell.                                      She feels such a terrible death of two beloved people that she is already dead. ) - ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ The dim light is not strong and we may feel depressed in the winter afternoon. It offers a desolate truth and despair, in the 19th century the Christian belief is that there are two sins. One is presumption, you know you are going to be saved so you do not practice virtue in life; despair is when you do not have hope in salvation and heaven. God wounds us because he promises heaven, creates a longing as we have been taught that he promises salvation; this expectation of heaven can lead us to damage when we understand that maybe there is no heaven (heavenly hurt). There is no physical scar, is an internal difference when you have doubts about heaven. Nature seems to be different and the church seems oppressive; she tries to make personal experience universal. “We can find no scar” it is a human experience whether heaven exists or not. Winter landscape before sunset, we see the proximity of death with vanishing lights and growing shadows. Sunset when the darkness appears and death is approaching but there is soft light which is going away “certain Slant of light”. It will finally arrive when night comes, the external environment oppressive and the landscape transferred to the inner state with emotional damage because you have doubts about your salvation. - ‘I heard a fly buzz - when i died’​ ​post mortem conscious She wants to write about the frontier between life and death. She shows fascination about the state in between. The poem is written in past tense so the speaker addresses the reader when she /he has already died. Her sense of hearing is still alive because she hears the buzz of a fly. Why does she choose a fly? Life is ordinary and death is ordinary too. A fly that annoys you and irritates and interrupts this very important moment in your life that is death. Postmortem consciousness before you enter the mystery of death, there is a fly that disturbs you. - ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’ Here, we have the speaker who visualizes the house of the wealthy death. She imagines the underground of wealthy people surrounded by precious stones and materials. They are covered by a tombstone (the roof of stone). Nature seems to be indifferent to your death. Death people are not affected by the passing of the years, the heat of noon, by the arrival of a new day. The death people do not care about rulers or governments. You have been taught that resurrection will come and there is going to be saved. She represents these people like dots because they are insignificant in comparison. Dying in this poem is sleeping. These people are safe in their alabasque tumba. They have been promised by religion that they can be saved. If the sky is a stone, you cannot go to heaven. The stone is a prison. The beautiful alabasque chambers is the same for a poor person. - ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ ​- gothic fantasy - funeral metaphor Assumption that Emily Dickinson suffered mental breakdowns and emotional crisis after she recovered, moments in her life when she did not write any Poems and suddenly she wrote it as if she was recalling her experience with mental breakdown. There is mental control to record in past tense what she has experienced. She is remembering an experience. She is using a metaphor of the gothic phantasy of being buried alive that is understood as how she recolects a moment of emotional crisis. This poem is about a recovery from a mental breakdown. What falls in your consciousness The metaphor of the funeral becomes very clear. She uses a funeral because it is a metaphor to express catatonia or emotional numbness. Kinesthesia: there is movement in the poem of going down and leaving behind rationality and sense. Sounds and hearing of repetitional sounds that announce that you have died. Idea that you are attending your own funeral in isolation and cannot communicate with people, company of the living but you cannot communicate There is a repetition of sounds. When you suffer a mental breakdown you are surrounded by mourners. She does not hear the bell of the institutional religion. Religion cannot help, the bell is tolling but she cannot hear it. Therefore it does not offer her any consolation or support when she hears the funeral in her head, you are compared to a corpse in a coffin as the space of the brain. “-Then-” suggests the Continuation of falling down again. - ‘I died for beauty - but it was scarce’​ ​- John Keats The idea of beauty and truth, which are immortal. Emily Dickinson is going to contradict Keats. The speaker has already died and she is speaks to a man who is besides her. The speaker (she, Emily Dickinson) has sacrificed herself for beauty. Poem about death “I died for beauty” - Post-mortem consciousness. She sacrifice her life for ideals of beauty but dying for it is useless; she sacrificed her life for poetry and was useless. inside the tomb she talks to a man who is buried besides her and this man died for truth instead.   Both have died for an ideal, she was not looking for truth she just was looking for beauty; The man died for truth but not for beauty. The man concludes that beauty and truth are the same. Here we find a positive message, when you die you are not alone she is with someone else Here, the speaker who has died express that he is not alone, he is accompanied by the ideas of truth and beauty. Truth and beauty do not die because your consciousness still alive Since she has her consciousness her ideals do not die in the grave. this is not a victory.   Nature is indifferent to your death. Moss (musgo) will reach you lips and is going to cover up the names. Your ideals will be silenced by nature. The only thing that matter is time and death. - ‘Because I could not stop for death’​ ​- myth of proserpine, anthropomorphic death Poem where Dickinson tries to imagine dying as a mysterious journey to eternity but expressed as a personal encounter with Death - death as a person - anthropomorphic. Is a gentleman, the personal encounter, extended metaphor of the myth of Proserpine. A woman from new England, possibly Dickinson herself, who imagines a man who seduce her and is death. She is kidnapped by a gentleman, Death in capital letters like in German nouns. A man who is driving a carriage and invites the woman to come with him, inviting of forcing the woman. The Man is kind so she must respond the same way with civility. He stops for her and she must accept and did not have time before but now she finds no objeción of the woman to under take her journey to eternity to death, they Travel together. Marriage with death, encounter with death is the encounter with a man that you married, she abandons her labour and leisure for his civility (she leaves her life) there is no objection when Death asks you to go with him in his carriage. She does not feel she is a victim and accepts that has to be done, idea of resignation. Death tells the girl to slow down, no rush, the journey to eternity is not a fast journey. There is a third passenger: Immortality. social interactivo in the 19th century cannot be alone before being married, they need a “Chaperone” a young girl needs immortality as a third passenger to ensure the honorable Destiny of the woman. The woman accepts that, “we passed the school, where children strove…” journey in the carriage to death and she remember different stages of her life, first school then maturity and eventually sunset as growing older before dying. Death in the carriage does not tell the woman the journey will be long, tells her to bring one cloth, when you die is cold and she is wearing summer clothes, she wears a wedding dress. When darkness comes is cold and she starts to feel the