Ignorance In Emily Dickinson's Poems

1 7. Select at least three poems by Dickinson of related significance and make an argument for your selection based upon a close reading of each poem. Ignorance is a prevalent theme in the assorted poems of Emily Dickinson. I have selected the poems 305, 449 and 1129 as they depict various manifestations of ignorance and also display a keen sense of irony, which perfectly accentuates the vicious condemnation of all that is (and isn’t). Poem 305 has an intriguing concept of time. It is divided into three distinct moments: life, death and when your conscious mind realizes that it has died. The first two are concepts with which we are familiar, we experience life every day and we all expect one day to die, but the third, the in between time, …show more content…
In this state, the ignorance is found to be in us; we do not allow ourselves to achieve satisfaction. Instead we wallow in our inadequacies and shortcomings, we don’t know how to be happy. The portrayal of life as an “instant”, especially in contrast with the expanse of death, reinforces the point that what we do in this life proves to be wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet even in this miniscule aspect are we unable to make peace with ourselves, which is ironic because we are able to do so in the infinity of death. The entire last stanza is devoted to the state of death.“The Mind is smooth – no Motion-” illustrates its vastness, and emphasizes that death is eternal. Upon hearing this the mind pictures an endless lake, no shore in sight, and the waters remaining forever tranquil; this is what death is akin to. The final three lines of the stanza describe the mindset of our person, being “contented” in our ignorance of infinity (death, after all, is infinite, as is the universe), and blissful in our