Cheyenne Morris Oct, 29th, 2016 Mr. Sabel AP Lit and Comp Emily Dickinson was a poet who chose to live a life in near isolation. It has been speculated by scholars she may have suffered from mental complications such as agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, depression and/or anxiety. An aspect of Dickinson’s writing style is her seemingly strange distribution of capital letters spread out through her works. She was a scholar at Amherst college, studying topics such as botany, mental philosophy, English and classical literature. Sh spent nearly her entire life at The Homestead, which had been built by her grandfather, Samuel Dickinson. Her writing style is intriguing- she utilizes odd punctuation and short stanzas, with rhymes that are …show more content…
The author describes everything happening, the beating of a service- “like a drum”. However, there is a sense of stillness until the end of the poem, in which “a plank of reason broke”, and she drops down and down, and stops knowing- denoting an end to an unseen suffering she may have experienced. The symbolism behind the lead boots demonstrates a sense of heaviness, “creaking” across the ever-wearing space- the mind of the writer. The poem describes depression, a feeling of loudness and intensity encompassing the victim, but no escape, the writer is numb and is unable to move. There is a sense of …show more content…
She had encountered a sort of intense melancholia- leading her parents to send her to Boston in order to recover. She had befriended Benjamin Franklin Newton, whom she had come to idolize as a mentor; he later died. After a period in which her spirits were once again high, melancholy had struck again after the death of the principal of Amherst academy, Leonard Humphrey died of stroke. She had written a letter describing her depression after the fact, how many of her friends were now gone. She found herself progressively withdrawing from the