Emily Dickinson Museum

“Another Elegy” is a poem about the relationships in life that happen. In the line “This is what our dying looks like..” gives us as a reader the feeling that we need to believe that when something bad happens, we need to just believe that something that is there. The poem is about someone trying to kill themselves. It happens in the line, “he let the gun go off in his mouth.” Then, all of a sudden, the bad side of the person in the poem comes out. The husband’s head and the wife’s mouth…

Analyzing “The Death of a Moth” Gary Gilmore states that, “Death is the only inescapable unavoidable sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we were born.” As we look into the “The Death of the Moth” we are able to see the conflict between life and death. Virginia Woolf illustrates that the struggle between both is neither won, or loss. In the way that Woolf changes the tone throughout the piece, and the metaphor of the struggling Moth conjure a sense of pity and hopelessness to the reader.…

One connection I found in this set of poems was Bishop’s fascination with animals, particularly birds. I decided to focus on her poetry and their allusions to animals because I thought there was more of a connection to be had between the different poems. “Some Dreams They Forgot” is a rather somber poem and it starts off by describing the death of bird: “The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly” (PPL, 139). The poem refers to the birds for a few lines before it focuses on the people in…

Through their works, American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson comment on the mysteries of life and the end result of death. In a combination between the words “death” and “brain,” in the poems “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” and “The Brain – Is Wider Than The Sky,” Dickinson attempts to show the reader the numerous possibilities of life. Walt Whitman, in the poems “Song of Myself,” and “Leaves of Grass”, tries to combine the words death and grass in an attempt to explain how to cope…

Sylvia Plath is known for being a feminist writer before the women’s rights movement. She wrote numerous poems and books including The Bell Jar. The story is about a women that is slowly losing her sanity and includes all of her family and friends. The time frame makes the story more intense because treatment then was very harsh against mental illness. But they didn’t know how much more damage they were actually causing. Mental illness can’t be forced out of a human but it can be helped if the…

Well used imagery can be as vivid as a one million paintings. Kate Chopin uses imagery throughout many of her timeless short stories. Kate Chopin was a short story author based out of Louisiana. Chopin was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, MO and later died on August 22, 1904. Throughout her life Chopin was a very well-known women’s rights activist. Kate Chopin was also very against the abuse and enslavement of African Americans. Chopin uses amazing imagery throughout the short story…

Many people fear death at the back of their mind, unconsciously dwelling over the surreal fact that they would have to come face to face with it some day, yet most do not bring themselves to explore it completely until it lurks in the corner or appears on their doorstep. The sonnet “And You as Well Must Die, Beloved Dust” and the dramatic monologue “Identification”, explores the concept of death and how each writer comes to grips with it. Both poems express reactions to the inevitable nature of…

Sasha Maharaj has used a personal tone to convey emotions underlying her feelings about relationships in the poem, “Worthless’’. In this essay, I disclose how poetic devices, diction, syntax and other language functions have been utilized to reveal feelings/emotions of the writer in regard to relationships. Taking into account the title of the poem, one cannot put a figure on what or who is worthless. Nevertheless, it is known that worthless is an adjective; meaning something that has no use or…

“Hunting Snake” written by Judith Wright and “Pike” written by Ted Hughes are two poems about nature and animals. Hunting Snake has four stanzas and Pike has eleven stanzas. The animals in the Hunting Snake and Pike seem to be similar animals as they hunt in similar ways by being slow, quiet and pouncing to surprise the animal. Both of the poets write about their encounters with hunting animals, a hunting snake and a pike fish. Judith writes about a “big black snake” in nature hunting like in…

While Anne Sexton and Robert Fagles were both inspired by the Van Gogh painting The Starry Night, they execute their ideas into two similar yet very different poems. Primarily, despite the fact that both poems are named after the same painting, the subject, their experiences, and the speaker of each poem are different. Additionally, both poets stimulate the reader’s senses through different images to evoke a similar gloomy atmosphere and convey the theme of death and madness. Thus, Sexton and…