Emily Dickinson Literary Language

Poetry is known for its careful literary language people used for its esthetic qualities, other than its semantic content. Emily Dickinson was a keen observer who mostly wrote anything that intrigued her and what she knew. In most of her poems, she employs metaphors instead of speaking in a literal sense. Although she was unrecognized in her time, she was posthumously known for her unique use of syntax and form. Many emotions were expressed in her poems. Intoxication, heartbreak, and motivation were spoken in her three poems, related to some situations, that captured the eye. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson began writing as a teenager. She had many early influences in her life such as a family friend Benjamin Franklin Newton whom she wrote about
in one of her poems and a cherished correspondent Charles Wadsworth who were her main influences on writing. She never married and has always been secluded from the real world. “Scholars have thought that she suffered from conditions such as agoraphobia, depression and/or anxiety, or may have been sequestered due to her responsibilities as guardian of her sick mother. Dickinson was also treated for a painful ailment of her eyes” (1). Confined in her home, “Dickinson was most productive as a poet, creating small bundles of verse known as fascicles” (1). In her spared time, she studied botany and kept in touch with a variety of contacts. At the age of 55, on May 15 1886, Emily Dickinson died of kidney disease. “Little of Dickinson's work was published at the time of her death, and the few works that were published were edited and altered to adhere to conventional standards of the time” (1). After her death, her sister Lavinia Dickinson discovered hundreds of her poems on which she crafted over the years but were not published until 1955. “The strength of her literary voice, as well as her reclusive and eccentric life, contributes to the sense of Dickinson as an indelible American character who continues to be discussed today” (1) To begin with, intoxication is being drunk by alcohol; in Emily Dickinson’s “I taste a liquor never brewed”, she describes an uplifting affect in the beauty of nature.
“She uses the metaphor of drunkenness or intoxication to express how the beauty of nature elates her” (1). The metaphor is easy to identify. She uses a drinking metaphor on the first line. “Pearl, a precious gem, indicates the value of liquor made under the best of circumstances; her liquor (the beauty of nature) is even more precious” (1). In the second stanza, humorously, she tells us “she is drunk with summer's splendor; the sky is intensely blue or "molten"(1). In stanza’s three and four suggests that nature will forever intoxicate her. “She will "drink" nature until foxgloves stop blooming and when butterflies give up gathering nectar from flowers. She equates nectar, and its positive associations, with "drams" and then? she will "drink" or revel in nature even more” (1). At the end, the poem ends with an image of the sun beginning to set while she leaning on it like a drunk leaning against a lamppost. This lighthearted and amusing poem can represent two ways; she can represent herself as a drunk rebel sublimated against society's restrictiveness or perhaps a naughty little girl
persona. Clearly, intoxication can be very fun weather by the consumption of alcohol or just intoxicated by the beauty of nature.
But a heart break is no fun at all; especially if one person didn’t show the same affection as the other did. In “Heart, We Will Forget Him”, Emily Dickinson tells her heart to forget her love. This short poem is written in two stanzas and only four lines in each. She instructs her heart to “forget the warmth he gave” and she “will forget the light” (1). Once she gets over the one she loved, she will feel better and her "thoughts may dim". Although it may take time, “I may remember him!” A heartbreak does take time to heal but there are things a person can’t forget no matter how long it takes or what they do to forget their love. Emily Dickinson knew her unusual act of love was not going to be asked
for. At last, people who cover up their emotional states appear to be stronger than what they truly are. The physical manifestation of someone’s emotional state can be misleading. In “A Wounded Deer Leaps the Highest” shows how ‘when the going gets tough, the tough keep going’. This poem “Emily Dickinson proved that even a wounded deer that has no probability of ever rising again after being hunted can leap higher than its healthy companions. That the perceived weak are actually the strongest” (1). This indicates how people who suffer tend to do remarkable things. Remarkably, Emily Dickinson has a fun and interesting play on words. In her poems, she speaks of herself or of many persons. Her poems mostly catch her interest and speaks in not in a literal sense but in a metamorphically way. With an adventurous spirit, she speaks with exaggeration with intoxication from the warmness of summer or she will forget the person “friend zoned” her or she speaks how she covers up our emotional states in “A wounded deer leaps the highest.” All of her poems are metaphors of what the people feel inside their own state of mind.