Why Do I Love You Sir Analysis

Why Do I Love You, Sir?-Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was an innovative poet and ahead of her time because of her ideas. She changed how one views poetry because she viewed everything around as an equal. Her poem, “Why Do I Love You, Sir?” is a perfect example of one of her best poems. The poem’s theme is about love and describes the belief that love cannot be explained nor expressed in words. The speaker is evidently head over heels in love with the gentlemen mentioned and their love is bound in a way that cannot be expressed by words. Although Dickinson does not use many literary devices, she does include rhetorical devices such as personification, unconventional punctuation, and unconventional capitalization to express the speaker’s love for the man mentioned. In the first stanza, the speaker uses personification to represent her love in an abstract way. Because there is no firm answer, nature is personified as love. In the second line of the first stanza it states, “The wind does not require the grass to answer-wherefore when he pass she cannot …show more content…
In the beginning of stanza three, the speaker states, “the Lightning-never asked an Eye Wherefore it shut-when He was by-Because he knows it cannot speak-And reasons not contained-Of talk-There be-preferred by Daintier Folk”. The narrator emphasizes the word “Lightning” with unconventional punctuation by placing a hyphen to separate it from the rest of the stanza. It is placed to refer that lightning can be a scary part of nature just how a person cannot help but fear strong feelings. She reverts to the fact that lightning does not question an eye for why it shuts or blinks when light passes by because it knows an eye cannot speak. It remarks that even if an eye could talk it would do no good noting that some things cannot be put into words or logic. Therefore, the use of unconventional punctuation is vital to emphasize the message of