Descended from the tradition of Puritan religion and also influenced by sentimentalism and Romantic views of death, Emily Dickinson presented a highly individualistic treatment of death in her poems. Emily Dickinson and Edgar Alan Poe are often compared and analyzed together because of their “death” moods in their works. Poe and Dickinson had many similarities in their lives: both had early losses that haunted throughout their lifetimes, and both dealt with their tragedies in destructive ways. Poe used alcohol and drugs; Dickinson used emotional and physical isolation.
They were non-typical persons of their times, and both Poe and Dickinson created beauty with their poetry, putting images and pictures in the reader’s mind with pictures of nature and romance, capturing these emotions. But their “darker” side that makes them most similar attracts readers and encourages finding answers. When reading Dickinson and Poe, a reader deals with sorrow, loss, terror, and the final step – death. They conveyed a Gothic writing style that can pull the reader into their nightmares. Dickinson and Poe introduce death as the focal point of self-consciousness, the unknowable center around which our thoughts inevitably swirl.
They both used this concept and it was significant in their works. If we associate these writers with music, Emily Dickinson would be music of grief notes and changing moods, and Edgar Poe would be a composer, who is a hostage of his thoughts that affect his pieces. To compare Dickinson’s poem #315 and Poe’s “Ligeia,” I would like to start with analyzing these works separately even though they have similar features, because both these pieces are difficult to understand due to many symbols that convey the author’s thoughts and feelings. Emily Dickinson is loved by a lot of readers because her poems are ambiguous.
The Term Paper on Theme Of Death In Emily Dickinson Poetry
Theme of Death in Emily Dickinson Poetry Not one of Emily Elizabeth Dickinsons readers has met the woman who lived and died in Amherst, Massachusetts more than a century ago, yet most of those same readers who have come to understand her through her work feel as if they know her closely. However it was her reclusive life that made understanding her quite difficult. However, taking a close look at ...
Everyone can understand them in a different way. Poem #315 is very fascinating to read, because you gradually understand the meaning by reading it again and again. As in many other poems, #315 Dickinson tells us a story that always has just one end – death. I saw it as a poem that describes physical abuse, using a powerful force that becomes stronger from a line to line. The first four lines show us a “He” (“He fumbles at your soul/ As Players on the Keys/ Before the drop full music on-/He stuns you by degrees).
We don’t know who or what “He” is, but we know that it is something or somebody powerful.
A fascination with nature consumed Emily Dickinson, and probably, influenced by Henry Thoreau, in the poem #315 she uses nature as a powerful force. “Development” of this poem reminds levels of development of a thunderstorm. It doesn’t start out heavy and powerful, it starts out with a wind that we feel in the first four lines. Then the air gets colder, the degrees go down, and powerful thunder vibrates the soul of a person on the earth. The next four lines describe the storm that is getting more powerful; “Prepares your brittle Nature/For the Etherial Blow/ By fainter Hammers –further heard-/Then nearer-Then so slow. In these lines Dickinson plays with contrasts, and shows Nature as brittle and fragile that powerful winds are able to knock down trees with the greatest of ease. Here I imagine Nature as a person that seems very strong first, and then can be destroyed, using his own power to act against himself. In next lines the storm is overhead, and unpredictably, it begins to produce lighting. Next two lines that don’t rhyme with others, work as a conclusion: “When wind take Forests in their Paws/ The Universe is still. ” Every person is a separate Universe that is affected by many factors.
Someone destroys himself and someone has been pushed to violence and has become a victim. There is only one end – death that can come from nowhere, but before it happens, there are levels to go through. In its turn “Ligeia” is Poe’s most successful attempt to merge the Gothic grotesque with the traditional love story. Ligeia is the name of the story and she is the object of the narrator’s love. Ligeia preserves death and light that Poe places in her way. And even when she dies, her memory remains the primary fixation of the narrator’s mind. She becomes his obsession, and he doesn’t want to get rid of it.
The Essay on Red Death Story Poe Prince
Edgar Allan Poe's short story entitled The Mask of the Red Death is an artistic example of vivid symbolism. Throughout the sinister tale Poe writes in a style that appeals to all five senses and captivates the reader's curiosity until the story's dour conclusion. Upon first glance, the story seems to be a complex tale of good versus evil. If the reader were to examine the story more deeply, they ...
Whereas the blonde-haired Rowena, who is absolutely opposite to Ligeia, replaces her as the narrator’s wife, but the darkness of the marriage bedroom suffocates the blonde, and Ligeia returns in Rowens’s body, imbuing the blonde’s body with her darker tones. It is as a black victory of death that concludes the story. Poe contrasts light and darkness to symbolize the conflict of two philosophical traditions. Ligeia and Lady Rowena represent the irrational and the rational respectively; it is a battle of heart and mind. Ligeia wins this fight. And her ultimate victory is her return from the dead.
It confirms that the narrator has lost his power of rationality and lost touch with reality. Poe abused opium, and he was less concerned with the quality of narrator’s senses than with the power of his visions. For me it seems that the narrator died with Ligeia. He can’t imagine his life without her, he is alive physically, but his visions replaced his real life, and whether or not Ligeia’s return from the dead is actually physically real or an opium-induced delusion, her apparent physical manifestation at the end of the story means that she has become more real for the narrator than a memory. Dead” world penetrated in the narrator’s life, he is not able to differ reality anymore because of his obsession with lost love, and this love becomes the ability to revive a dead body. Both Emily Dickinson and Edgar Poe have a great deal of intensity in their writing styles. They display a preoccupation with psychological aspects. Both writers seem to like to investigate the mind and the effects of different events on the psyche. Death is a very strong theme in all of the work, and each author seems to want to understand the dark realm and make sense of it. Lost love is another strong theme that is reflected in both artists’ works.
They focus on damaging effects that a lost-love can cause, especially in Poe’s Ligeia. Both Dickinson and Poe believe in the idea of the afterlife, and for them, death is a beginning of a new adventure, but both of them are afraid that there is no afterlife or eternity, and lives they have suffered through have been for naught. In the poem #315 Dickinson expresses this idea in the last lines. “When Winds take Forests in the Paws-“ is an act of actual death, and a line “The Universe – is still” says that Dickinson is not sure that afterlife exists, because it is impossible to know.
The Term Paper on Black Cat Narrator Poe Story
The Effect of the Use of Irony on the Progress of Poe's Short Story, 'The Black Cat " This Paper will interpret a short story, 'The Black Cat', by Edgar Allan Poe. My Purpose is to show the effect of the use of irony on the progress of the short story. I Suspect that use of irony in Edgar Allan Poe's short story, 'The Black Cat,' is one of the main points which allows the hidden character of the ...
Death is a natural process, and the earth doesn’t stop spinning. Dickinson tried to find out this secret throughout her life, but this secret will be discovered, when you face death yourself. That’s why this theme is attractive. You can guess, but you will never have an answer. Edgar Poe develops the idea of afterlife through an image of Ligeia. She is dead, but she still exists for him as a miracle that follows him everywhere. He says: “She died; — and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine.
