Links to hypertext Dickinson sources mentioned in lecture

Links to sites I showed in Monday's lecture can be accessed on the course webpage under Links (sorry, I haven't figured out how to hyperlink from here, but you can cut and paste this address:)
http://ic.ucsc.edu/%7Eksgruesz/ltel120c/links.html

Other Dickinson homages

From Sarah:

The Firmament - a Stage for Two -
The Sun and next the Star -
They make no Room - for Liminal -
Is where the Difference are -

The Diamond in His crystal Glow -
The Emerald in her Robe -
Dot softly - as the Night progress -
Opon Darkness - but a Glass -

And each Degree - with Gold Attar -
The Sun in His slow Arch -
Leaves seeming Sameness cross the Heav'ns -
Too bright for Eye to see -

Our "Dickinson" poem

Here's the current version...feel free to suggest edits or post earnest interpretations of this "masterpiece"!

A firmament - suppose a Star
Heaven - glow emerald -
Blaze - to Altar - permanent
Himself - opon the Gold -

Dickinson 706, from Kate Hochler

Our group discussed poem number 706, by Emily Dickinson, looking for many of her traditional poetic characteristics. First, we looked at slant rhyme, in which the poem is mostly written. There are 5 perfect rhymes and the rest of the 12 stanzas are slant rhyme. Some examples are: "life, shelf", "broke, crack", "freeze, privilege" ect. We felt that this poem especially contained a lot of normalizations, as well, the most obvious one being the word despair (the last word in the last stanza). It is capitalized and referred to in a very tangible, object like way. The capatalization also makes it more of a pronoun. The whole poem seems to be referring to this inevitable feeling of despair, really portraying it separate from its emotional state. Also, she uses a lot of idiosyncrasies, for example the capitalization of every "you", "New Grace", the word "Life" and other random words in the middle of a line etc. Her very common syntactic fracture is very apparent, in this poem. On lines 26-7 "Except that You than He/ Shown closer by-" could easily be written and understood "Except He shown closer by than you". Traditionally, Dickinson's poems have a drastically different last stanza. To me personally, the final stanza always seems like the grand finale, the structure, rhyme scheme,heavy usage of stressed syllables and dashes, makes you read it fast and powerful,and it ends with a single word in the last line, like an explosion.

Jimmy's Section
Group members: Kate Hochler, Kathleen Quinlan, Will Hurst, Stephanie Barrow

Dickinson #719

In our group discussion during section, my group (comprised of Keila Topete, Luke Church, Daniela Amodi, Ryan Kieffe, and myself) looked at Dickinson's poem #719. We identified the "He" as being either God (hence the capitalization throughout the poem), or more likely as Christ as the poem appears to tell the story of Christ's resurrection. We noticed a great deal of odd structure in sentences, such as in line 13, and the reification of "years" in line 6.

In reading over Emily Dickinson's #427, my group was able to put many of the terms from the Emily Dickinson reading strategies list into use. It was easy to see how un-conventional a poet Dickinson was. Other than random dashes, the poem had no punctuation whatsoever. It did not take away from the reading of the poem, however. There was also very little rhyme. The use of night and day, which is present throughout Dickinsons poetry did not fail to be included here. They became part of Dickinson's personal poetic lexicon. The technique we found to be used the most was the use of oxymorons. In line 2 she uses the phrase 'sunset at the dawn' while in line 4 we see 'midnights due at noon'. These were our most clear cut examples of poetic use of contradiction put down as only Dickinson could.

Mark, Edward, Hannah, Gregory, Rick

Ideas on Dickinson #336

In section last night, my small group discussed a few ideas we found interesting in Dickinson's poem #336 which starts "Before I got my eye put out-." A first glance through revealed that the poem quickly defeats the standard ballad rhyme scheme of abab or abcb. The first stanza's second and fourth lines do not rhyme, but the last line of the first stanza and the first line of the second do, which seemed noteworthy. Nor do the second and fourth lines of the second stanza rhyme; but they end in words which align with those in the first stanza's second and fourth lines, at least through slant rhyme. It seems like the poem's lines should end in rhymes like these:

out
see
eyes
me

Today
Sky
Heart
way

and instead it rhymes like this:

out
see
eyes
way

Today
Sky
Heart
me

The effect is to blend the first and the second stanza together, both visually and aurally. The topic of these stanzas is sight, hearing and imagination, and this structure creates a complication of the normal impressions created by the ballad rhyme scheme.

Also, the third stanza has five lines instead of the normal four. The first line and the second line are almost identical:

The Meadows -mine -
The Mountains - mine -

It is as the poem is more concerned with the iteration of ideas, or perhaps images, than with lines, and since the first two lines of the third stanza contain almost the same image of possession, three more can fit in the same stanza. This feature of the stanza almost shadows over the fact that it too has an odd rhyme scheme. In fact, the only stanzas which fit the conventional ballad rhyme scheme are the fourth and the fifth stanzas. Rather than starting out by obeying convention, Dickinson has started out with a disruption of convention and then cleaned up her form as the poem closes - though it doesn't come all the way back into the fold, as it closes on a slant rhyme and a dash.

Dickinson and the image

I highly recommend the online essay, "'For flash and click and suddenness': Emily Dickinson and the Photography-Effect," by Marta Werner, a leading Dickinson scholar. It is hyperlinked with daguerrotype images of Dickinson's family and with typical examples of this short-lived photographic technology, making this a scholarly work genuinely OF the Web rather than just ON it.

See: http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume3/werner/
and click "Intro." (You can later return to this page and look at her related resources.)

Postmortem photography

Here's the website link I mentioned, on 19c post-mortem photography: http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/haunted/ISA%20index/book%20of%20the%20dead/book%20of%20the%20dead%20photos.htm
[If you can't get that link to cut and paste, google "haunted rains victorian photography".)

It would be useful to think about the extent to which an elegaic poem serves the same function as a memento mori (= memory of the dead). The photo offers a "realistic" portrait of the loved one, to aid in recalling what s/he looked like. Yet, as we discussed, the conventionality of photography itself imposes a reading, an interpretation, upon that vision (through devices like the frame, the vertical or horizontal aspect ratio, the way the face and body are aligned, the studio props). What are the conventions of elegy, and how do they push forward certain ways of understanding a particular loss?