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