Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's 'Bloom Is Result-To Meet A Flower'

Both close readings and distant readings of texts help to gain a better insight of the idea that the writer was trying to portray through their writing. When I read Emily Dickinson’s “Bloom-is Result- to meet a Flower” I did both a close reading and a distant reading of the text. Both helped to give me a deep understanding of the poem. The close reading consisted of me examining and studying the text. In my close reading I looked up words I didn’t know and read the poem multiple times. I made connections and was able to piece together the puzzle Dickinson made formed in her writing through my close reading and analysis. In my distant reading I used the tools Voyant and Google NGram to look up how common the words in the poem were used at the …show more content…
The top five words used by Dickinson were light, tell, buzz, flower and fly. These words tell me that a lot of Dickinson’s writing in these poems had to due with nature and the world.The poem I was assigned, “Bloom-is Result- to meet a Flower” contained one of the five top used words, which flower. My poem as a whole was all about nature and how it affects the daily life of a flower. Being that the majority of the most commonly used words in the poem come from nature; light from the sun, buzz from the bees, flower from the plants and fly like the bug or like the birds and other insects, I believe that she based most of these poems. Without the voyant tool, I would never have noticed that Dickinson often repeated words that had to do with …show more content…
I believe it is a very beneficial tool used when analyzing a literary work. In my case, I used the tool to help me see the common language during the time of Dickinson’s writings. Using the voyant tool was especially helpful because I was able to compile all of the poems assigned to the class and see if Dickinson wrote about a common theme, which after analyzing I found to be nature. I feel the Google NGram tool was useful to help me see now language has changed over time and to transport myself into the language at the time of Dickinson’s writing. The strength of using both of these tools is that it allows for better understanding of the concepts. By being shown the most commonly used words, I was able to see what the focus of the text was, therefore understand the overall idea of the poem. The only limitation I found was with Google NGram. I wish there was no option to see how the words I input into the tool ranked in a scale of popularity during a certain time period. This did not take away from my overall understanding of the poem, but I felt it would have been a useful tool to