In Dickinson’s first poem “I think just how my shape will
rise” her choices in language and punctuation stand out. All of the words she uses create an
experience of an afterlife. However her
choice to put quotes around “forgiven” and “Sparrow” create a feeling of
skepticism. Dickinson might have been
exploring this feeling of doubt about Heaven.
The whole poem also describes the body as a simplistic mass. It is interesting the body is formless when
the poem is quite structured. In this
version of Heaven, the body loses its form and soon becomes like a spirit. She also capitalizes some words such as “Hair”
“Eyes” “Sparrow” “Anguish” and “Heart.”
Her capitalization of these words puts a definite name on the abstract. They are more like entities than descriptions
or simple nouns. However, somehow naming
these characteristics also makes them more humanistic, like she’s giving them a
name.
In her second poem, Dickinson uses anthropomorphic images to
describe forces of nature. By putting
death in comparison to all of these huge things, death becomes a state of peace
and not sadness. She says it’s good to
be in tombs. She flips around this
hopelessness and sadness humans feel when one dies, and says that this person
is essentially better off in death.
Nature seems to be in disarray, it is very active.
The last poem that we have from Dickinson speaks about
revenge and its living nature. Here
revenge seems to be a positive thing, a form of catharsis. She encourages people to quickly avenge
themselves or others however, because waiting longer makes the anger hungrier
and hungrier.
I agree with your analysis of Dickinson's use of personification in “237.” However, I disagree with the notion that Dickinson uses anthropomorphic imagery in “1172.” In fact, I think that she is very specifically using words associated with animals. She uses the word “galloped” when talking about the forests, a word used only when talking about horses and a few other 4 legged animals. The Lightning “played like mice.” The first 2 lines of the poem don’t involve personification either. Although Dickinson wrote, “The Clouds their Backs together laid,” this could also be animal imagery as well, and the ambiguity of the next line “The North begun to push” really doesn’t give the reader much to go on. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that these lines are examples of personification, though, simply because we don’t have enough information to go on.
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