Frances Smith

UH 2010-02
Journal 1
POEM A:
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,

POEM B:
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us don't tell!
Theyd advertise you know!

Prepares your brittle substance

For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Your breath has time to straighten,

Your brain to bubble cool,
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

The poetry of Emily Dickinson is striking to me because of its potent imagery and
emotional charge. Now that I am becoming better acquainted with the poet herself, I am
additionally interested in her process and inspiration.
According to my (minimal) knowledge of poetry, Dickinson is a typical poet in that she
employs sensuous diction to suggest not only the tangible, but the intangible; abstractions allow
the poet to make pictures of invisible things such as emotions. For example, when she refers to
God as a musician who fumbles at your spirit (poem A), one can see his faith or doubt laid out
before him, he the composer and God the pianist. Mans life is out of his hands, and thus his fear
of damnation takes the shape of one unnamed key among eighty-four, any of which might be the
key the Mighty Pianist strikes next.
This gloomy subject matter also seems typical of poetry; death, after all, is mans greatest
inspiration due to its unknown nature. However, after watching the video on Monday, I realized
that Dickinson is somewhat unique in the way she lived this concept. As made evident by its
appearance in most of her poems, death was Dickinsons life, and perhaps only in an escape from
societal life did she feel free to truly live: As she writes, How dreadful to be somebody! and
later, Im nobody! (poem B), as if she sees herself as a ghost among living society who can
move about but not interact. As I understand poets and poetry, Dickinson was and is not alone in
this artistic struggle to define the value of a life.