Emily Dickinson's Use Of Personification In Apparently With No Surprise

Improved Essays
Evils are not caused by God; rather, that they are a part of the nature, things happen in cycles, what is happening now has happened before and will happen again. In her poem “Apparently with no surprise” Emily Dickinson writes about the attitude of nature and demonstrates the nature’s cycle of life and death. The poem begins as the frost chops off the head of a happy and blossoming flower. She is not surprised with this happening because it is reenacted in the winter every year. The sun observes the whole thing, but is indifferent and proceeds to “measure off another day” (l. 7). The god approves the jobs of frost and the sun and shows no interference. The poem has inconsistent rhyme and consists eight short lines featuring iambic tetrameter. Technically, there is only one sentence in "Apparently with no surprise." There is no punctuation to clearly indicate a sentence break until the very end, where the poem finishes with a period. The attitude of the author is mixed. She is emotional when she portrays a …show more content…
2). As the season change, the cold frost chops off the innocent flower and kills it, “The Frost beheads it at its play” (l. 3). But there is no surprise in the scene when the flower dies from a cold, freezing temperature because winter comes and kills the flowers every year, “Apparently with no surprise” (l. 1). The frost just does its job what it is supposed to do in his scheme of life. That is just reality and things can often happen accidentally, “in accidental power” (l. 4). The killing of flower is unintentionally harsh because nature does not intend to hurt, only to follow its natural plan. Death is an inevitable part of life and everything in the nature has to die in any way. Here, the flower represents life and the frost represents

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    The timeline itself is detailed. This book analyzes many of Dickinson’s poems. Sometimes he criticizes her work, but always presents the reader with his interpretation of her work. The chronology allows readers to examine his interpretation and reference a timeline to find parallels between major events in Dickinson’s life and her poetry. Keane, Patrick J. Emily Dickinson's Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering.…

    • 1736 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Retaining Innocence In Tony Hoagland’s poem “Please Don’t,” he personifies nature to fully understand the naïve lives of them and the emotions that go along with them being sheltering. The poem takes place in the springtime when the flowers have all merely bloomed. A narrator, from afar, recounts the descriptive poem to the audience. In the second and third stanza, he talks about the relations between different aspects nature, in this case “about the rain, the fog, the dew” and how, in return, the flowers “lose control of themselves” (5, 8).…

    • 813 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Robert Pack’s poem “An Echo Sonnet: To an Empty Page”, the narrator is uncertain about what comes with death. He worries about his future and what may happen to him. As the narrator asks questions into the emptiness, he finds answers in the echoes of his voice. Robert Pack uses literary devices such as rhetorical questions, selection of detail, metaphors, juxtaposition, and connotation to construct the meaning of his poem.…

    • 873 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Theme Of Revenge In Iliad

    • 1466 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The most interesting aspect is that the role of the god in the poem is to punish the negligent people and to recognize the sacrifices and beliefs of the true…

    • 1466 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “The Flowers” Death, it attacks us more than physically. It’s an overbearing truth within reality that hits us heavy in our feelings. Though the death spoken of now, is one of symbolic representation. In Alice Walker’s, “The Flowers”, she shows this representation of death by saying, “And the summer ended.” Summer symbolically portrays feelings of warmth, happiness, adventure, and mysticism.…

    • 231 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Personal Response Human beings are forced to face certain adversities in life to define who they are? And what do they stand for in ethical values to reinforce who they are. In life each individual is different as the circumstances are not the same to everyone however how we react in those circumstance made who you are. Certainly everyone reacts different, but some factors help in shaping who we are as is the cases of baby, they relieve in their parents, their environment and the values they grow up are the tools and make a great difference in how they will react and allow those decisions to shape their identity. Some psychologist belief in the theory that depend their environment and parents enroll in their life will mark in their identity…

    • 1141 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Grazing in the fields, roaring in the jungles, or wriggling in the dirt, “Nature’s People” are found everywhere. Throughout history, people have admired nature and its beautiful creations, especially animals, and Emily Dickinson is no exception. In “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”, Dickinson simply admires a snake, personifying it with interesting metaphors and unusual word choices. Although she respects a snake in her poem, she also feels as if he is a sly, chilling, and devious creature.…

    • 696 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    If one thing is certain, it is that men and women are looked at very differently as they age and change with time. Aging is viewed as a negative concept, particularly in women. In Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” the speaker is expressing his subtle, insulting feelings that women should take advantage of their youth and marry young before they fall from their “prime” (line 15). Herrick uses symbolism and tone to convey the theme that women should seize the day because time is sure to run out more quickly than expected.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many modernist poets believed that concreteness of detail was crucial to their writing, and aimed to use concrete objects to communicate their poetic ideas. Robert Frost and Marianne Moore both used concrete objects to describe how these details communicated their response to the changes of the Modernist era. In, “Poetry” Moore used concrete objects to emphasize the difference between materialistic views as opposed to the meaning of meaningful and emotional text. In “Nothing Gold Can Stay” Frost used the concrete objects to display how changes in society to fit the Modern era were not always beneficial. As well as comparing changes in the modernist era, the two also wrote about their quest for realism using concrete details.…

    • 1224 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To begin with, Whitman, an ardent supporter of democracy, saw his poetry as the “bible” of a new American religion and himself as the prophet. He was born a Quaker, (Religious Society of Friends)—a Christian movement which professes the priesthood of all believers. He did not follow this religion as an adult. According to his doctrine, “No restrictions whatever should be placed upon an individual’s religious convictions.” In Song of Myself #48, in the first Stanza: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” shows how he does not discriminate on others’ ideas and religions but rather has his own perception which challenges traditional Christian views of “God” and “soul”.…

    • 392 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Emily Dickinson’s writing showed a whole new type of writing in the first person. The speakers could see what was going one through their eyes but what was also going on in their mind. Her writing didn’t have limits, you wouldn’t feel trapped in a story but you would feel like you were in a place where the possibilities are endless and anything could happen.…

    • 328 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The poem 'Because I Could Not Stop for Death ' by Emily Dickinson dramatizes the conflict between mortality and immortality and the speakers gentle acceptance of death. It is a story told by the speaker memorizing the day that she died. The speaker reveals that she is a very busy person that could not sit idly by and wait for death. She reveals her mortality in the first two lines of the poem. “Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me” the speaker insinuates that she realizes no one can escape death.…

    • 842 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dickinson, who grew up in a Puritan environment, rejected many core tenants of Christianity such as sin and damnation, and her idea of eternity greatly diverged from the typical materialistic view of Heaven. However, she also did not conform to the tenants of Transcendentalism as her emphasis on the incomprehensibility of one’s spirituality and after-life clashed with the traditional belief in the full participation and absolute knowledge of the universe. As witnessed in much of her poetry, Dickinson is obsessed with the idea of transcendent reality and her relationship to it, however as Glenn Hughes points out, Dickinson is still aware that transcendent reality is beyond her capacity to comprehend its boundless and infinite nature. In “LOVE,…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Universally accepted as symbols of beauty, flowers are often used to symbolize love. Although beautiful, they are of a delicate nature that can only survive temporarily in this world. Often people observe their magnificence in the seclusion of gardens, where they are rarely left to grow freely. Contained within flowers are manifold functional uses, but their purpose is confined to being observed for their beauty, much like what was expected of women. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a man investigates a peculiar death several years after it has occurred.…

    • 1552 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is a poem by Robert Frost. Written during the roaring 20's, it was a part of his Pulitzer Prize-winning publication of poems, New Hampshire. The main overarching idea for the poem is that nothing precious can last. This is demonstrated in the metaphors, the structure and other figurative language found in the poem. There are many metaphors used in the poem that illustrate the overarching idea.…

    • 640 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays