Death And Knowledge First Of All By Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, the "Belle of Amherst", is one of the most famous poets in American History. Born in December of 1830, she grew up in a well-known family in New England, and wrote poetries since she was young about 1850s. Although many of her poetries never got the chance to be published in her life, she won renown for her extraordinary writing skills, innovation of poem forms, and contribution to developments of American poetry many years after her death. Generally, her poems were written thoughtfully with real emotions. Nonetheless, with her mysterious personal life, she wrote her poetries in different styles with various topics and emotion. In the following parts of my essay, I will mainly talk about the topics of “death” and “knowledge”

In “There is No Frigate like a Book”, there are two similes, which are “frigate” and “courser”. A frigate was a swift water vessel, a boat designed to move quickly and effectively to its destination, which is Dickinson’s thought: the book takes us places in what is an instant. Likewise, a courser is not an average horse but a fleet stallion, a horse for racing and chasing, the strongest and fastest kind of horse for battle. So to say a book is even better than a frigate and a page of poetry better than a courser is to give high praise indeed, if agility and speed are highest values. However, in the second half of the poem, Dickinson said that reading books and poetry is affordable to anyone, including “the poorest”, who cannot afford a courser and are not be able to have a frigate. Those poorest can still “travel” without any worries of costs. She then introduces the chariot, another rapid transit vehicle, which is an even better mode of transport than a frigate or a courser. Furthermore, she presented an ironical idea that the chariot, such an “expensive ancient imperial car”, could be “frugal”. It is frugal because books and poetry cost nearly nothing, but may take us where we want to go. In this poem, the “Traverse”, a pun for travel and poetry, also has the deeper meaning our lives in this world. It seems

In the first stanza, Emily Dickinson compares the brain to sky in order to show the width of the brain, but brain even can contain, the widest thing, sky. And then she compares Brain to sea and states that brain has the capacity to absorb water in the sea. And the third stanza is a conclusion that Brain is as important as God, and she cannot say which one is more