The first time I read alabaster chambers, I didn't realize that the first stanza is
referring to burial sites. My initial reaction was that everything seems happy but
something bad has occurred, making the surrounding feeling ironic to the event that had
occurred. After rereading the poem and looking up alabaster, I was struck by the
representation of time and death in this poem. I felt Dickinson was saying that death is
insignificant in the long run. After looking her up online, I found that the strict
Puritan belief that only a select few die and go to heaven led her to ponder the true
meaning of death. While I have read Dickinson's poems before and fond them to be morbid,
I was pleasantly surprised that this one seemed simply reflective. I also appreciated
how the poem is jam packed full of visual imagery and personification. My favorite line
of the poem demonstrates this: "Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine".
Out of the assigned readings for Thursday, the Autumn poem had the greatest visual effect on me. I felt that this poem had horrific visual imagery, but was ironic at the end because she mentioned a beautiful rose and a bonnet. The contrasting images of bloodshed and pretty items made me think of how people not directly in the war were still affected by it. In a poem about a country filled with bloodshed, she used parts of the body (parts of the heart too) to describe the flow of the blood. Here I thought Dickinson could also be referring to bodies lying around.
While "They Dropped like Flakes" was a less harsh poem about the Civil War, the stark irony of using images usually associated with positive connotations caught my attention again. This time, she uses a rose, snow flakes, and stars. I don't know if this is reading too far into it but I pictured stars on a soldier's uniform and the bright red obviously made me think of blood. I haven't read a ton of Dickinson's poems, and so I'd be interested in finding out whether she uses pretty images to show contrast on a continual basis in her poems.
On another note, her use of capitalization makes nouns important...I wonder why she liked to capitalize these on top of proper nouns? Was this a style of the time, or was it only her style?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I noticed what you did about the irony as well. It is a very interesting and, I think, powerful technique. Dickinson seems to be paying attention to what the words mean in many ways. She seems to deconstruct our initial associations with words or structures to bring about a different point. She brings our attention to the words themselves. I love it. I don't know if anything is typical or expected in her poems. It takes me a while to even understand what she's talking about. I feel like if I read a poem of hers once and feel like I've gotten the meaning, I must have the meaning wrong. She has so many layers!
ReplyDelete