Poems Major Concepts (TS) (VVS)

Question 1

Fly

Answer 1

• A speaker seemingly recounts their own death and the vigil preceding it with Dickinson once more engaging with death’s rituals and inscrutability.
• While Dickinson expresses some faith in the Christian afterlife, this is mitigated by her opus’ consistent reminders of death’s gothicism and tenacious mystery.

Question 2

Slant

Answer 2

• Nature’s light is seen to engender despair, reflection and – possibly – connection.
• Dickinson acknowledges a darkness in humanity’s relationship with nature and divinity that subverts the sentimentality of transcendentalism.

Question 3

Publication

Answer 3

• A speaker defines publication as a sacrilegious act, reflecting Dickinson’s own strained relationship with the literary marketplace.
• This passage characterizes publication as a ruthless force hostile to poetic independence aligning Dickinson with transcendentalist tenets defending the freedom of human imagination against the claims of a grubby literary marketplace.

Question 4

Opposite House

Answer 4

• A male speaker blends the domestic and gothic while reporting on a neighbourhood death.
• Although the speaker’s account reminds readers that ‘it’s as easy as a sign’ to perceive death in a domestic setting, this belies Dickinson’s criticism of social and religious traditions that seek to expedite death by reducing it to visible ‘signs’ and religious and social routines; for Dickinson these dissipate death’s inscrutability, which she prefers to acknowledge unflinchingly.

Question 5

Blank

Answer 5

• The conceit of wandering through a maze of ‘blanks’ signifies despair but also the power of intuition and imagination to redeem experiences of emotional suffering.
• while Dickinson gives voice to a debilitating despair, she may also use it as an occasion to reaffirm her romantic faith in the power of the imagination to endow clarity and even hope in times of despair.

Question 6

Blazing

Answer 6

• The sun is represented as a magical juggler whose multiple guises reveal Dickinson’s somewhat romantic celebration of nature’s grandeur and dazzling ephemerality.
• Dickinson’s contemplation of the ephemeral qualities of light leads to her assertion, seen elsewhere in her opus, that what is transitory in nature – and in life – is fragile and precious.

Question 7

Two Butterflies

Answer 7

• Dickinson utilises the butterflies’ life cycle as a conceit representing nature’s beauty and inspirational grandeur, as well as the transience of poetic vision.
• The intense experience may reflect Dickinson’s own view of the epiphanic, yet ephemeral, nature of poetic vision and nature’s sublime role in inspiring feats of imaginative perception.

Question 8

Frost

Answer 8

• The speaker resists death but rails against its inevitability.
• Dickinson condemns transcendentalist and religious beliefs which position death as a necessary part of nature’s processes; rather, she laments the irreplaceable singularity of individual human lives.

Question 9

To Know

Answer 9

• An elegiac lyric in which a speaker, possibly a lover, speculates upon the nature of a soldier’s death in the civil war.
• Dickinson departs from aspects of Christian and transcendentalist thought by suggesting that the afterlife is not the only site of sublime consolation as there is beauty to be found in the here and now of human existence.

Question 10

Because

Answer 10

• The conceit of death’s carriage ride seems to promise a Christian afterlife but the poem belies something darker.
• Dickinson’s final view on death is withheld in favour of allowing the self to experience a range of reactions, be they sentimental or macabre, to death’s steadfast unknowability and life’s ephemerality.

Question 11

Hope

Answer 11

• A poem of definition in which the speaker casts new light on the necessity and resistance of hope in times of despair.
• Celebrates the ‘little’ voice of hope that is always within us no matter how hidden its shape, no matter how strained and tenuous its song, a song that becomes most inspiring in moments of despair and adversity.

Question 12

Loaded Gun

Answer 12

• The speaker finds questionable solace in a strange and unequal relationship reflecting Dickinson’s criticism of patriarchal power.
• Dickinson characterizes female identity as a site of dormant and unrealized potential, exposing the meagerness of pursuing self-actualisation through subservience and, thus, exhorting female readers to resist rather than acquiesce to their oppression.

Question 13

Saddest Noise

Answer 13

• Nature is not a site of romantic refuge but rather a sphere which triggers the speaker’s struggle to accept human mortality as part of God’s creation.
• Dickinson’s portrayal of death and beauty in nature sees her once more avoid a cultish worship of Earth.

Question 14

Narrow Fellow

Answer 14

• One of the few poems published in Dickinson’s lifetime, an adult speaker recounts a frightening boyhood encounter within nature.
• Dickinson’s speaker takes a journey into nature only to discover there an inherent malevolence, disabusing readers of the Emersonian belief that nature is a retreat in which we realise our highest and noblest selves.

Question 15

Letter

Answer 15

• The speaker, a figure we suppose to be Dickinson herself, intimates that the poetic vocation entails both revelation and isolation.
• A plea to the world not to ignore her strange and elliptical ‘letters’ but instead - in true epistolary spirit – to develop through them a shared sense of humanity.

Question 16

Funeral

Answer 16

• The conceit of a funeral in the speaker’s brain comes to represent psychological anguish, with Dickinson presenting one of her most confronting poems on despair.
• Through the portrayal of a horrendous anguish survived, Dickinson gives agonizing voice to emotional suffering but also positions suffering as a pathway to revelation.

Question 17

Something Quieter

Answer 17

• Dickinson’s speaker contemplates a death within the context of a ritualised Puritan wake, revealing once more her reservations with the Ars Moriendi.
• Dickinson evokes but then deliberately undercuts a ritualized wake scene to criticize contemporary religious efforts to evade death by drawing readers’ attention to death’s tenacious inscrutability.

Question 18

Like Rain

Answer 18

• The speaker, possibly a vate-poet figure, spontaneously recalls in verse form a sublime event in nature.
• Relates a sublime, possibly divine experience in nature which transports the speaker-poet to the outer circumference of nature, human knowledge and the resources of language.