Dickinson`S Poems Essay, Research Paper

Dickinson Explication #130

This poem speaks of the final summer days of the year, possibly coming after the initial fall cool down. The speaker begins by saying “These are the days when Birds come back—A very few—a Bird or two—To take a backward look,” referring to the few remaining birds in the last of the warm days of the year. She then describes these days as deceptive, comparing them to that of June, “A blue and gold mistake.” In the third stanza she begins by saying “Oh fraud that cannot cheat the bee,” talking about the disappearance of bees since the first signs of autumn. She concludes the poem by comparing these days to the death of Christ, saying “Oh sacrament of summer days, Oh Last Communion in the Haze—Permit a child to join.”

Dickinson Explication #285

This poem tells of the speakers familiarity with the nature of the New England area, compared to that of other regions of the world. She begins by saying that the song of the Robin is what she knows, going on to say “Because I grow—where Robins do.” The speaker then says had she been born in a different area the song of another bird would be her “Criterion for Tune.” Next she says “The Buttercup’s my Whim for Bloom,” because she was raised near orchards. She then compares this to what she would have been exposed to in Britain, saying “But, were I Britain born, I’d Daisies spurn.” She concludes by saying all of this is because she is from New England, saying, “…Because I see—New Englandly—The Queen, discerns like me—Provincially.”

Dickinson Explication #328

The speaker describes once seeing a bird come down the walk, unaware that it was being watched. The bird ate an angleworm, then “drank a Dew / From a convenient Grass–,” then hopped sideways to let a beetle pass by. The bird’s frightened, bead-like eyes glanced all around. Cautiously, the speaker offered him “a Crumb,” but the bird “unrolled his feathers” and flew away–as though rowing in the water, but with a grace gentler than that with which “Oars divide the ocean” or butterflies leap “off Banks of Noon”; the bird appeared to swim without splashing.

Dickinson keenly depicts the bird as it eats a worm, pecks at the grass, hops by a beetle, and glances around fearfully. As a natural creature frightened by the speaker into flying away, the bird becomes an emblem for the quick, lively, ungraspable wild essence that distances nature from the human beings who desire to tame it. But the most remarkable feature of this poem is the imagery of its final stanza, in which Dickinson provides a breath-taking description of flying. Simply by offering two quick comparisons of flight and by using aquatic motion (rowing and swimming), she depicts the delicacy and fluidity of moving through air.