Growing up in the 1800’s Emily Dickinson lived in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts her whole life. She was educated at Amherst Academy, which is now known as Amherst College, for six years. She soon enrolled in the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary where she studied for a year. She would then drop out because she thought of herself as one of the “lingering bad ones” (Dickinson, 1190). Emily Dickinson never married; she stayed locked away in her homestead with her sister who also never wedded and devoted her life to reading. During the years of her isolation within her homestead, she began writing. Emily Dickinson wrote poems, where she would question aspects of her life that others did not dare to question. Emily Dickinson’s poems “The Brain-
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She uses figurative language an effective way of communicating an idea that is not easily understood because of its abstract nature or complexity. In “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” Dickinson uses imagery to help set up what the narrator sees in the room as he or she dies. The narrator describes the silence in the room using the simile “was like the stillness in the Air/Between the two Heaves of Storm” (3-4). She does this to set up what it felt like to the narrator as they were dying, it was all quiet all that was left was to wait for the storm to hit, or in this case, for them to die. The narrator describes seeing eyes solely looking and staring at them, hearing the onlookers in the room breathing. A person reading “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” can vividly see and experience what the narrator was describing thanks to the use of Emily Dickinson’s words.
Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain-is wider than the Sky” and “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” both speak of an unknown in her life. One of the many unknowns of Dickinson’s life was her faith. Dickinson was unsure if God was actually real. She wondered if God was only a figment of the imagination. She shows this unknown in her “The Brain-is wider than the Sky.” Dickinson questions her own thoughts in her poem by saying “if they do” in the last stanza to show that she is unsure if she is right and no one should hold her to her words …show more content…
She saves this metaphor for last because it is the most complicated of the three. Dickinson thinks of God as an abstract thought that forms from the human mind. She makes an analogy at the end of the last stanza that would read similarly to ‘the Brain is God as sound is to syllable.’ Sound and syllable barely differ in what they actually are only minor technicalities make them different. Sound is raw and unformed, whereas syllable is what humans have formed in their mind. Dickinson is trying to say that human brains and sound are raw, what has been there from the beginning; God and syllables are what humans have made up. Emily Dickinson is saying that God weighs just as much as the brain because the brain is God. The brain formed God; therefore, they are essentially the same except for a few technicalities that differentiate the
She uses figurative language an effective way of communicating an idea that is not easily understood because of its abstract nature or complexity. In “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” Dickinson uses imagery to help set up what the narrator sees in the room as he or she dies. The narrator describes the silence in the room using the simile “was like the stillness in the Air/Between the two Heaves of Storm” (3-4). She does this to set up what it felt like to the narrator as they were dying, it was all quiet all that was left was to wait for the storm to hit, or in this case, for them to die. The narrator describes seeing eyes solely looking and staring at them, hearing the onlookers in the room breathing. A person reading “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” can vividly see and experience what the narrator was describing thanks to the use of Emily Dickinson’s words.
Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain-is wider than the Sky” and “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” both speak of an unknown in her life. One of the many unknowns of Dickinson’s life was her faith. Dickinson was unsure if God was actually real. She wondered if God was only a figment of the imagination. She shows this unknown in her “The Brain-is wider than the Sky.” Dickinson questions her own thoughts in her poem by saying “if they do” in the last stanza to show that she is unsure if she is right and no one should hold her to her words …show more content…
She saves this metaphor for last because it is the most complicated of the three. Dickinson thinks of God as an abstract thought that forms from the human mind. She makes an analogy at the end of the last stanza that would read similarly to ‘the Brain is God as sound is to syllable.’ Sound and syllable barely differ in what they actually are only minor technicalities make them different. Sound is raw and unformed, whereas syllable is what humans have formed in their mind. Dickinson is trying to say that human brains and sound are raw, what has been there from the beginning; God and syllables are what humans have made up. Emily Dickinson is saying that God weighs just as much as the brain because the brain is God. The brain formed God; therefore, they are essentially the same except for a few technicalities that differentiate the