Like so many of Emily Dickinson’s poems, poem #280 employs the macabre imagery of death, here though, she employs a funeral as an allegory to losing your sanity, while not explicit, the reader can assume the author is speaking of herself. The poem is written in the past tense, as if the author is recalling the funeral from memory, hence we know that it is not an actual funeral, but a figurative one.
The structure of Poem #280 consists of 115 words, 20 lines and 5 stanzas. The author uses the common Ballad Stanza, and the rhythmic meter of ABCB, which consist of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. The rhyme scheme runs through-out the poem until the last stanza, the last line, “And Finished knowing – then –“ breaks this rhyme, which undoubtedly is intentional, as I will discuss later.
The reader will find the use of many stylistic devices; including alliteration; “Felt a Funeral”, and “Silence, some Strange Race”; onomalopoola; “Creak”; repetition “Kept, treading, treading”, “beating, beating” and “down and down”; and synecdoche, substituting the speaker for the speaker 's ear.
The use of the allegory of a funeral draws a stark comparison to …show more content…
This clearly shows the torment of the speaker; she is slipping sanity. Imagine, you are in a space, and the only thing that exists is a bell that tolls and you are an ear; you can do nothing but hear the bell toll. “And I, and Silence, some strange race” the speaker longs for silence, but silence, or her sanity, is separate, as if a “strange race”. The speaker is alone, and wrecked, “here”, which is her present
The structure of Poem #280 consists of 115 words, 20 lines and 5 stanzas. The author uses the common Ballad Stanza, and the rhythmic meter of ABCB, which consist of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. The rhyme scheme runs through-out the poem until the last stanza, the last line, “And Finished knowing – then –“ breaks this rhyme, which undoubtedly is intentional, as I will discuss later.
The reader will find the use of many stylistic devices; including alliteration; “Felt a Funeral”, and “Silence, some Strange Race”; onomalopoola; “Creak”; repetition “Kept, treading, treading”, “beating, beating” and “down and down”; and synecdoche, substituting the speaker for the speaker 's ear.
The use of the allegory of a funeral draws a stark comparison to …show more content…
This clearly shows the torment of the speaker; she is slipping sanity. Imagine, you are in a space, and the only thing that exists is a bell that tolls and you are an ear; you can do nothing but hear the bell toll. “And I, and Silence, some strange race” the speaker longs for silence, but silence, or her sanity, is separate, as if a “strange race”. The speaker is alone, and wrecked, “here”, which is her present