Emily Dickinson Poetry Analysis

[amy h]

did you get any help with this? as am doin it myself now, and would love any help . thanks amy

[mono]

I am a first year literature student at a university in the UK and I have read some useful tips here on Emily Dickinson. I never read any of her stuff before yesterday and she is killing my brain as well as soothing it, which is weird to say the least.

I need to roughly, dissect "I'm wife.." and "For each ecstatic instant..."

We have a 2 part question; the first is to analyze the rhythm and rhyme patterns between both as well as look at language and tone.

The second part is to look at the relationship between Dickinson and the readers, as well as looking at how they reflect upon and / or are looked at by eachother. And also how poems effect us 'physically' and if so, how does dickinson effect me. or you.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I like reading her stuff because she is simply a misunderstood genius with words and poetic form. I am not the most avid poetry reader but she has definitely struck a chord with me.

Thanks in advance.
half_a_dent

Welcome to the forum, half_a_dent, and good to hear I do not feel alone in having my brain simultaneously "killed" and "soothed." Indeed, it makes sense, and, though I have read almost all of her poetry, she continues to do the same even upon re-reads. With this, I would love to help, but, FYI, it helps a lot if you post the poems.

I'm wife; I've finished that,
That other state;
I'm Czar, I'm woman now:
It's safer so.

How odd the girl's life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.

This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I'm wife! stop there!

In terms of rhythm and rhyme patterns, and all that literary theory nonsense so many professors make such a requirement to learn, a lot of closed quatrains (the most popular structure for Dickinson), full of near-rhymes (which she only sometimes utilizes), and lots of alliteration (which she used a lot in conjunction with assonance). With language and tone, at least to me, Dickinson composed this poem with a surprisingly flustered self-conviction, so surprising because the majority of her poetry seems to have a depressing tone to it; this, on the contrary, contains self-identity, blunt language with few adjectives or adverbs (as opposed to the usual high number of similes and metaphors in her poetry), and frustration.
Now to the good stuff of analysis and reflection.
How Dickinson, this poem, or her other poetry affects you, half_a_dent, I have no idea, but this poem, to me, touches unique subjects of development, societal conformation, and powerlessness, the latter-most likely appearing as the only common theme in the poet's works. Whether she wrote this particular poem about a specific person seems debatable, but with the usual introspective nature of Dickinson's poetry, I feel compelled to remain more upon the side the poet writing of her own internal fight of growth from a girl to a woman, but it indeed reads with some feeling as though she wrote from another married woman's perspective, hence somewhat of a satire.
As the saying goes, "hindsight is 20/20," Dickinson envelopes that contemporary phrase in a psychological theme of a girl transitioning to womanhood in the somewhat self-righteous and more sociologically acceptable role of a wife, the "Czar," and, with that term, it makes me wonder if Dickinson intended the pun to a satire, the all-powerful wife. The girl's life, "the finished state" in the first stanza, appears rather absurd and foreign, as if the speaker lives now upon higher ground from what she overcame, hence the metaphor closing the second stanza of seeing earth from heaven, staring from a superior paradise to from where one came. The speaker takes comfort in her position as "Czar," and almost gives the impression that no higher exists, this heavenly seat of womanhood, ascended from an earthly child. "But why compare?" she asks, and that Dickinson ended the questionable satire with "stop there!" makes one ask if this somewhat manic feeling of reaching the "Czar wife" does not appear the highest of heavens it seems according to the speaker; perhaps the ascended girl thought childhood a heaven from earth, just as the woman feels of her present state.
How this makes me feel, to answer your final question? Powerless and living in an ignorant state of self-righteousness, yet simultaneous neverending growth.
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For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

Of rhythm and rhyme patterns, this easily classifies as a ballad, again in quatrains, the most common form of Dickinson's poetry; this poem also reads iambic in nature, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed, thus "For each ecstatic instant / We must an anguish pay . . . etc. Of language and tone, this reads immensely more like a common Dickinson poem with its themes of hopelessness, joy, inevitable sorrow, and written in the most alluring and tempting-to-the-ear vocabulary and metaphors.
The poem itself, if one can dissect the language, reads with some simplicity, that virtually the sweet cannot exist without the sour, that "ecstasy" and "anguish" thrive hand-in-hand, that "beloved hours" and "sharp pittances of years" persist in a universal "ratio," balancing the opposites of what we interpret as the good and bad in whatever concentrations, so to speak, they present themselves in the medium of uncontrolled time. How can this make the reader feel, you ask? Once again, powerless, hopeless, and bound to suffering to deserve and tempt joy.