Emily Dickinson Comparasion
...ss than a year apart. Both poems talk about death and the impression in the tone and symbols that convey creativity. One might undoubtedly agree to eerie, haunting, if not frightening tone in Dickinson's poem. Dickinson uses controlling adjectives-"slowly: and "passed"-to create a tone that seems rather placid. For example, "We slowly drove- He knew no haste/ ...We passed the school.../ we passed the setting sun," sets a slow quiet, calm, and dreamy atmosphere (5, 9, 11, 12). "One thing that impresses us," one author wrote,” is the remarkable placidity, or composure, of its tone" (Mitchell, 456). The tone in Dickinson’s poems will put its reader’s ideas on a unifying track heading towards a bugling atmosphere. Dickinson's masterpiece lives on complex ideas that are evoked through symbols, which carry her readers through her poems. Besides the literal significance of the "school," Gazing Grain," "Setting Sun," and the "Ring" much is gathered to complete the poem's central idea. Emily brought to light the mysteriousness of the life's cycle. One author noted that "the children, at recess, do not play as one would expect them to but strive" (Vendler, 40). On this invited journey, one vividly sees the "Children" playing, laughing, and singing. This scene conveys deep emotions and moods through verbal pictures. In "I heard a fly buzz when I died" Most readers would agree that this basically is a poet’s narrative. What is fascinating, however, is that the frightening tone teases us into looking beyond the naturalistic details of the scene. Dickinson uses controlling adjectives "stillness," "stumbling" to create a tone that seems rather placid. For example, "the stillness in the room/ was like the stillness in the air/with blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz," sets a frightening atmosphere (2, 3, 13). In this poem one author wrote, “Gothic tone relief interposes, by one of those homely inconsequence which may be observed in fact to attend even upon desperate human occasions.” (Abbott, 140) Examining Emily Dickinson's poem which begins “I heard a fly buzz when I died" in the light of the theological tradition the author was nurtured in, the reader finds a new symbolic value such as the fly. The fly symbolizes corrosion and decay “I see the fly as an agent or emissary of Satan," one author wrote, "the Satan puritans would expect to be present at death of and individual possibly or certainly damned to hell" (Munter, 427) Death affects others besides the dying person. "The eyes around had wrung them dry" (5). It involves the willing of property. It entails the ritual of the deathbed and the entrance to another and everlasting life. All of the elements of th...