After you have read and reflected on these eight poems about time, in order to write your paper you will want to select a few (say, three) to concentrate on (while reserving the right to make brief reference to some or all of the others as you compose your essay). Always choose to write on the poems that stir you most, those you are drawn to explore in more detail.
One reader might want to treat Dickinson’s whimsy as she invents the stops for her train — and the remnant of that whimsy as she imagines the carriage ride with Death — with an ironic remnant of the whimsy in her mention, in “The Heart asks Pleasure” of “those little Anodynes / That deaden suffering.”
Another might be drawn to Dickinson’s radical use of metaphor, centering on the strange and unworldly metaphors Dickinson uses to describe the stopping of time in “After great pain” (what is “A Quartz contentment, like a stone”)? Grouped around “After great pain” might be the other strange metaphors in “Pain – expands the Time”: what are “Gamuts of Eternities”?
Yet another reader might be drawn to Dickinson’s relentlessness when writing of time and could investigate aspects like the following:
No matter which three poems you choose to concentrate on, you should make a list in two columns, grouping the aspects of your poems:
What Is Literal |
What Is Imagined |
Things in Common: Matter |
Things Different: Matter |
Things in Common: Style |
Things Different: Style |
Under What Is Literal, put whatever basic psychological life-experience the poem conveys. For “After great pain,” you might write, “Aftermath of emotional devastation: no sensations or feelings; time confused; time stands still; environment unclear; self rigid.” Under What Is Imagined, you might write, for the same poem, “Nerves like tombs in a cemetery; heart ‘stiff’ as in rigor mortis; ‘yesterday’ indistinguishable from ‘centuries before’; feet on wooden circular track: ground? air?; self — crystalline or stony, which?” Inquiry into figurative language reveals, in each case, an originating emotion that has found its way into language.
Under Things in Common: Matter, you could list ideas about the sense of time — its beginning, its end, and its interior episodes — that links your three poems together. Your poems might have in common their sense of a crisis marking time into Before and After, for instance; their sense that time has stopped altogether; or their contrast of time with eternity. Under Things in Common: Style, you might put the fact that all three of your poems have three stanzas; that all three display an iron sequence of inseparably linked events; that they all begin with the first event in a sequence; that they all end in aftermath rather than with the final episode; or that they share syntactic forms. Don’t be concerned if only two of your poems show such resemblances: you can always use the third to show differences.
Under Things Different: Matter, put whatever ideas differentiate your three poems from each other: they may all exhibit different emotional responses to time, or they may treat time as natural in one instance, as unreal in another. Under Things Different: Style, put any structural and stylistic differences: your poems may begin at the end of their linear sequence; they may not give a true ending to the sequence at all; one may use chiefly verbs, another, nouns; one may be all one sentence, another, composed of several sentences; or one may arrange items in climactic order, another, not.
Decide on an order of treatment of your poems: perhaps shortest to longest, most ordinary to most imaginative, or least paradoxical to most paradoxical. Your reader wants to feel that you are setting out, in some logical order, your ideas about Dickinson’s poetic strategies for dealing with the felt experience of time.
Before beginning to write, think about your own feelings about time. Have you ever felt time stand still? Have you ever felt that one year went by much faster than another? Have you ever felt time drag? Have your feelings about time been influenced by the loss of people through death? Has time ever seemed to become more intense, day by day or year by year? Has time ever seemed to go in circles? Has clock-time always seemed real to you? Do the concepts of Eternity and Immortality have meaning for you? It is only by reflecting on your own senses of time that you will be able to make a true connection to Dickinson’s experience and to see how each poem stylizes sequence differently so as to be able to render the psychological structure of experience with maximum accuracy.
As you write, remember that a good essay on poetry evokes the atmosphere of a poem (by such words as “leisurely” or “relentless”; “whimsy” or “sublimity”; “sinister” or “light-hearted”; “even” or “irregular”; “intimate” or “public”; “appealing” or “grotesque”). It is not enough to go through the poem and say what it says: what you need to show your reader is how it says what it says — by what means, with what atmosphere, with what vividness of language, with what turns of syntax, with what temperature in the feelings. Otherwise, if you remain in the realm of paraphrase of ideas, you are not conveying the emotion that propelled the poem into being, that made the poet break her silence.
You must quote the poem, or at least the parts of it you discuss (in the case of a nonprincipal poem), so that the reader can see the evidence for your remarks. It is a good idea to give a brief set of questions at the beginning of your paper, to interest the reader:
How did Emily Dickinson perceive time? Do her perceptions change with the nature of the experience she is evoking? Can time be sequenced in different ways? Is all time felt as evenly linear, or is it sometimes felt in different ways? When does time stop? How can the structures of our varied experiences of time be enacted with fineness and discrimination in a poem? Some answers to these questions can be found in considering three characteristic poems.
Then you can say, “The first of the three poems, the shortest and most paradoxical, embodies Dickinson’s contradictory views of time,” and begin with, say, “Pain – expands the Time.” After quoting the poem, it is a good idea to give your reader a one-sentence “view” of the chief aspects of the poem: its literal experience, its chief act of imagining, its subject-matter, and its form. These can be given in any order:
“The Heart asks Pleasure – first” is a one-sentence, two-stanza poem of increasing disillusionment with life, as the heart’s requests are ignored with greater and greater cruelty by its hidden “Inquisitor,” whose identity is revealed only at the end.
This one-sentence summary gives your reader a thumbnail sketch of how you see the poem and enables your subsequent analysis to fit into a comprehensible overview.
In concluding your paper, now that you have done the analysis of the strategies of the three poems, you can answer some of the questions raised at the beginning:
Not only does Dickinson expand and contract time, she also alters sequence and, in fact, stops sequence altogether, as her poems mimic the relativity of time in emotional experience.
Reread your paper to make sure that your logic and your evidence — your evidence will chiefly be quotations supporting your points — are sufficient to persuade your reader that what you say is true. Check that the beginning offers questions to interest the reader and that your conclusion offers answers to the questions raised at the outset. Ask yourself if you have evoked the temperature and feeling-tone of the poems as well as their imaginative and linguistic strategies. Ask yourself if you have shown, in your paper, why Dickinson is considered a gripping poet of intense feeling. If you have done your job well, your reader will come away from your essay not only understanding your three poems in relation to Dickinson’s structuring of time, but also wanting to read more of Dickinson’s poetry. A good essay whets the appetite of its reader.