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Emily Dickinson spent a large portion of he life in isolation. While others concerned themselves with normal daily activities, Emily was content to confine herself to her house, her garden, and her poetry. Due to her uncommon lifestyle, she was considered odd and was never respected as the great poet she is now recognized as. Living life as an outsider, her poems are written from a perspective we are not used to seeing in our popular culture. Even so, her works contain such themes as human nature / behavior , independence, the meaning of life, and optimism in a grim world. After reading and studying Emily Dickinson's works I have noticed many similarities between her beliefs and mine.
I believe that most people would have to agree she was far more intelligent than anybody would have even considered and that one comes to understand our world better after contemplating her works. Emily Dickinson's Much madness is Divinest Sense is a fine example of her themes of human nature and independence. In Much Madness is Divinest Sense she makes evident how society labels anyone as deranged that behaves and / or believes differently from normal. This is an example of human nature, groups of people tend to follow. Every day, I go to school with people who are labeled freaks, our society calls them this because they participate in behaviors different than the rest of us. They in turn call us sheep, which is a way of saying we are all followers.
Today Emily Dickinson would be a freak, most people realize this yet we look back and praise her for what she did. Knowing this, and the fact that history repeats itself, I find it hard to imagine why people still label others as freaks and ridicule everything they do. What would the people of the mid- 1800 s think if they saw how we treat the freaks of their time now? Why then dont people stop labeling others even though they know todays freaks will be praised in the future for what theyve done?
Because so far the poems Ive discussed have all hinted at the uglier parts of life; pain, loneliness, failure, labeling, and disrespect, Ive decided to end on a positive note. Dickinson's poem Hope Is the Thing with Feathers has the main theme of optimism in a grim world. The bird (assuming that little feathery noisemaker is a bird) symbolizes hope. Hope doesnt lead us out of bad times but it keeps us going with a mix of longing and desire of, and confidence and trust in, the good times to come. Hope is strongest in the worst of times. It would take a storm of pain and suffering so tremendously intense to lose the sole thing that keeps so many going, that if it does happen to someone then God save their soul.
Without hope you cannot survive long in a grim world such as ours. The poem ends saying that Hope has saved her in the worst times and the worst places but for all its done for her its never asked for anything. In my life there was one period of 5 or 6 months (that I will not mention), but it seemed as if hope was almost all that I had left. There were a few bright spots in that bleak and ugly time but for the most part it was hope that kept me going. I think this poem is a way of saying she went through some ugly times, but like her, if you can just hang on to that one tiny bit of hope it will come through for you and things will start moving in the right direction. In Emily Dickinson's Much Madness is divinest Sense, Dickinson criticizes society's inability to accept non-conformist and expresses the belief that it is the majority who should be labeled as, mad.
In the lyrical poem Much Madness is divinest Sense, Dickinson concentrates on society's judgmental views of non-conformists. Dickinson utilizes iambic tetrameter throughout the entire poem. There is, however, one exception; she uses two anapests in line 4: Tis the Majority. By changing the rhythm in this line, Dickinson emphasizes that it is the majority who is truly mad, and not the minority who have been wrongly labeled so. Dickinson's quick switch from iambic tetrameter to anapestic also emphasizes the subject matter nonconformity because it interrupts the flow of the poem. She also coheres to the subject of nonconformity in the rhyme scheme.
Although it appears to be written in free verse, Much Madness is divinest Sense does contain a small element of rhyme. The poem has an A B A C D E A D rhyme. For instance, the words Sense, Madness, and dangerous all rhyme, as well as the words sane and Chai). This unique rhyme scheme, once again, adheres to the subject matter of non-conformity. It is jagged and different like the individuals that society views as mad. In Much Madness is divinest Sense, Dickinson distinguishes between madness and sanity: the beliefs of the majority are sane, whereas those who dissent are considered insane.
In the first two lines, Dickinson asserts, Much Madness is divinest Sense - /To a Whitfield 2 discerning Eye -/. In these lines she is declaring that it is the nonconformist who is truly blessed with sensibility and logic to people with insight and understanding. Then Dickinson goes on to say that Much Sense - the starkest Madness -/ Tis the Majority, meaning that those who are viewed in society as having much sense, or conformists, have absolute Madness (3, 4). In the last four lines of the octave, In this, as all prevail - / Assent - and you are sane - / Demur - youre straightway dangerous - / And handled with a Chain -, Dickinson goes on to say that one can be sure that if a person conforms to society, or assents, then they are viewed as sane, but if they hesitate to conform in the least then they are viewed as dangerous and society would like nothing more than to lock them away.
The use of paradoxes in Much Madness is divinest Sense is another technique which Dickinson takes advantage of. The whole poem compares madness and sense which are opposite in meaning. Though these words are opposites, Dickinson finds a connection in meaning; while society views conformists as sane and nonconformists as mad, it is actually the nonconformist who is sane and the conformists who are mad, making the entire subject matter of the poem paradoxical. Dickinson also utilizes synecdoche and metaphor; To a discerning Eye- (2). The discerning Eye, she is speaking of is the vehicle and the tenor is simply a logical person (2). Dickinson also metaphorically states, Demur - youre straightway dangerous - / and handled with a Chain - (7, 8).
The chain the hesitant person is handled with is the vehicle, while the tenor is society's desire to get rid of nonconformists, or unique individuals. Another interesting poetic device Dickinson employs is that of point of view. She utilizes third person limited point of view throughout the poem, however in the last two lines she speaks of society's point of view calling those who demur... straightway dangerous. It is not Dickinson who feels that those who hesitate to conform are dangerous, but society.
By expressing Whitfield 3 society's point of view in such sharp contrast with her own, Dickinson makes the reader see that much madness really is divinest sense. The unity of Much Madness is divinest Sense is incredible. In just eight short lines, Dickson covers and analyzes not only her own ideals, but also compares them to those of society Emily Dickinson's poems have been a tremendous help in understanding life in general. It allows us to look at life as freely as we would an ant farm. It allows us to look at life through the eyes of someone whose sight hadnt been fogged with other's ideas. It lets us look back on our own lives with new insight and will help us make better decisions and observations in the future.
Her words lived on long after she has passed; in turn her ideas, observations, and messages will live on longer than her words. With every word read new beliefs are formed that will stay with the reader, these beliefs undoubtedly will be passed on to others until their origin is long since forgotten and people will begin to accept them as the truth. Bibliography: Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest. Ed.
by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Little, Brown and Company: Boston, MA 1961. Hart, Ellen Louise, and Martha Nell Smith. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate; Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Paris Press: Ashfield, MA 1998; Larkin, Patty. "Good Thing. " Angels Running. Compact disc.
Boston, 1993; Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf, Inc. : New York, New York: 1986.
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Research essay sample on Point Of View Iambic Tetrameter
