Your Thoughts Don’t Have Words Essay, Research Paper

Throughout Emily Dickinson’s life, she had to withstand the feeling of being an outsider because she was not the typical woman of her time. She was never married and the people in her town resented her for it. Society had its own schemas, or mental representations of how the world should be, and Emily did not fit in with those schemas. Much of her poetry therefore deals with the concept of suffering. For example, poem #378 (959) discusses the suffering she has withstood and her need for “delinquent palaces” where she could fit into her ideal world and be a part of a group because society had discriminated against her. Also, in poem #240 (579), hunger is the form of suffering that has to be withstood. In poem #122 (341), the first few lines give a sense of suffering due to society’s beliefs and discriminations. There are other poems that also deal with suffering.

I have selected poem #505 (1452) because it deals with withstanding mental suffering. Emily Dickinson was often in solitude and in her solitude she pondered the processes of the brain. This poem is one that tries to explain her views on how the cognitive processes in the brain work. She does this by explaining the way in which our brains do not use their full potential, and how we only experience a fraction of life’s possibilities. She shows that this creates unconscious intellectual suffering because our minds cannot be stimulated without challenges. A closer examination of the poem indicates that there is a psychological factor brought into its meaning: the fact that a human only uses a small fraction of the brain potential. We only like to pay attention to what agrees with our schemas; therefore we miss out on all of the other things that pass through our minds that we do not think are important. Emily Dickinson tries to explain this in her poem.

In the first two lines, “your thoughts don’t have words every day/ they come at a single time,” Dickinson is explaining that the ideas, images, and thoughts of the world come by only once, and if you do not grasp each aspect of them, you will not get a second chance. They will be gone before you realize that you have lost. In lines three and four, “like signal esoteric sips/ of the communion wine,” Dickinson explains what happens i the brain with the metaphor of communion wine as the whole of all of the thoughts that pass through our minds. The signal esoteric sips are the select few ideas that stick with us because they are signal or notable and they agree with our schemas. However, esoteric can also mean secret, implying that there are also secret notable thoughts that we do not grasp. We do not grasp these because they are secretly notable in the sense that we do not make a connection as to how relevant they really are. Lines five and six, “which while you taste so native seems/ so easy so to be,” explains exactly why some thoughts stick and others do not mostly by the word “native.” Because the signal esoteric sips are native to us, we assume that we perfectly understand or that it is easy. This is because the native ideas agree with our schemas. Dickinson boldly puts end to our preconceptions by the last two lines, “you cannot comprehend its price/ nor its infrequency.” She bluntly tells us that we do not know anything. She says that we are naive and aren’t thinking of the consequences of naivet . The infrequency she mentions is the unpredictability of the thoughts that pass through our brains that we do not take notice of and how we miss our on much of life’s potential. She puts an emphasis on a price that we will pay. This price is the unconscious intellectual suffering we face due to the lack of stimulation to our brains. This is from only taking notice of native things and not stimulating our minds with all of the other things that we miss. Because Emily Dickinson had to withstand suffering from her society she felt compelled to write this poem to show people that their lives should not revolve around preconceived notions.

In conclusion, Emily Dickinson’s poem #505 (1452) presents a clear problem with the way that we use our minds. Dickinson expressed in this poem that our schemas interfere with our mental capacity. The interference causes us mental anguish and also causes other, as well as ourselves, emotional suffering.