Emily Dickinson was a poet far beyond her time - perhaps, on an unconscious level, she sought to provoke reflection through the new standards of writing that are exhibited in her poems. Dickinson’s way with words reveals both vivacity and ingenuity in the treatment of human psychological complexity. While her poems express her deepest anxieties, they always do so with a great amount of irony and intellectual effort. Dickinson’s poetry concerns itself with the human predicament and destiny; she builds interchangeable and interpenetrating symbolic structures on such themes as love, freedom, death, immortality, and the self and simultaneously creates something that is both concrete and intangible, present and absent. Certainly, one of Dickinson’s …show more content…
For instance, the “Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” (line 2), the heart is “stiff,” (line 3), the feet “go round - / A Wooden way” (lines 5-6), the contentment is “like a stone” (line 9), the hour heavy and tense, for it is one of “Lead” (line 10). Dickinson’s insistence on this imagery confirms the sense of numbed consciousness, which is made even more explicit by the statement that the feet are moving mechanically. The subject no longer finds any purpose in life and persists in a state of mind that invokes the possibility of …show more content…
In her poems, Dickinson employed frequent use of figures of speech, such as metaphors, alliteration, and paradoxes, especially when referring to death. In “’Twas such a little - little boat” (FR 152), the poet employs metaphors to subtly highlight the fact that Life is a journey of no return. The following poem also makes use of assonating rhymes, one of the characteristics that especially marked Dickinson’s work