Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Metadata
- Author: Emily Dickinson
Highlights
Dickinson’s use of “slant rhymes,” or off-rhymes, like “pain-suffering” and “be-die,” which don’t allow the comfort that might come from exact rhymes and instead remind us of life’s conflicts and near misses. Slant rhyme can also be a way to express the pleasure of messiness, the joy of not being able to “Tell all the Truth” once and for all: — location: 560
Here, by reordering a statement that we might have expected to begin, “The Soul is condemned,” Dickinson can start her poem with her true subject: the terror and the necessity of the soul’s “Adventure.” Similarly, by stripping the poem of verbs (“[is] condemned,” “[It is] attended”), and by boldly capitalizing its final word, “Identity,” she increases its starkness and strangeness. — location: 572
“Presentiment — location: 579
As Dickinson herself predicted, her light may have gone out, but the lenses of later ages keep reflecting and refracting it in all sorts of inventive and unexpected ways. The intense eyes of the young woman in the photograph will keep peering into ours for a very long time. — location: 833
Inebriate of air am I, ^ref-61810 And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. — location: 962