Dr. Bordelon's Introduction to Poetry

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Lesson Plans: Dickinson . . . .

Dickinson | Victorians (Arnold et al.) | Moderns (American) | Moderns (English/British) | Poetry Month | Harlem Renaissance | Recent Poetry (Hayden et al.) | Poetry Today | Bishop et al. and a fond adieu 

Dickinson “I Died for Beauty” “My Life Had Stood” (298); “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” (506); “Because I could not stop” (531); “I Reckon” (532)

Dickinson's work is very individual -- yet open to all who take the time to interpret it. Below find some general guidelines that should help you when reading her poetry
From http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/dickpoems.html
  1. Speaker. Who is the speaker? What person (first, second, third) is ED speaking in? If it is the first person plural, with whom has she aligned herself? To whom is the poem addressed?
  2. Setting or Situation. What is the setting? Real? Abstract? What about the situation? Is there action in the poem? What is it?
  3. What are the verbs? What is their tense? Their mood (indicative, subjunctive, interrogative)? In what ways does their syntax vary from what you expect? Are any of them archaic or unusual?
  4. What is the form of the poem? Closed? Open? What is the meter? the rhyme scheme? Where does ED depart from these patterns and forms? Why?
  5. Dickinson is noted for her use of special kinds of rhyme. Where does she use the following, and for what effect?
    1. slant rhyme: a kind of consonance (relation between words in which the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels that precede them differ: add/read, up/step, peer/pare, while/hill)
    2. eye rhyme: rhyme that appears correct from the spelling but is not so from the pronunciation, such as watch/match, love/move, through/enough.
    3. true rhyme: identity of terminal sound between accented syllables, usually occupying corresponding positions in two or more lines of verse. The correspondence of sound is based on the vowels and succeeding consonants of the accented syllables, which must, for a true rhyme, be preceded by different consonants. Thus "fan" and "ran" constitute a true rhyme because the vowel and succeeding consonant sounds ("an") are the same but the preceding consonant sounds are different.
  6. What elements are repeated? Inverted? Why? What instances of repetition does she use? What is the effect of the repetition?
  7. What figures of speech does the poem contain? metaphor? metonymy? synecdoche? personification? extended metaphor? What kind of figure does she use as a comparison (vehicle)? Where has she used this before and with what kinds of meaning or resonance?
  8. What kinds of images does she use? olfactory? tactile? visual? auditory? thermal? Characteristic Dickinson images include patterns of light/dark, bee/flower, mind/body, life/death. Do these occur here? In what combination?
  9. Does the poem have an effective, striking, or climactic moment? Does it come to some kind of resolution? What kind? What recognition does the speaker's persona achieve, or does the poem chronicle simple description and observation?
  10. Tone. What is the tone of the whole? Solemn? Playful? Irreverent? Mournful? Objective? What is Dickinson trying to convey?
  11. Tradition. In what ways does she allude to other works or poetic traditions? In what ways might this poem be an "answer" to another author?
  12. Rhetorical figures. Where does Dickinson use paradox? hyperbole? anaphora? apostrophe? litotes? Why does she use them?
  13. Language. Note any words that are used in an archaic, special, or unusual way, especially words of three syllables or more. (These are less common in Dickinson's work than one- and two-syllable words.) Look them up in the dictionary, being careful to note obsolete or secondary meanings as well as primary ones.
Let's ease into her work, shall we?

Emily Dickinson

It dropped so low -- in my Regard --
I heard it hit the Ground --
And go to pieces on the Stones
At bottom of my Mind --

Yet blamed the Fate that flung it -- less
Than I reviled Myself,
For entertaining Plated Wares
Upon my Silver Shelf --

 About 1863

“I Died for Beauty”
  • Guess one of Dickinson's favorite writers?
  • What are some connections between this poem and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"?
“My Life Had Stood” (298)
  • Why is the date of this poem important?
  • Why a gun?
"I believe it is important to the spirit of the poem that death—not language as the slayer of the phenomenal world, not a metaphor for human emotion, or an exaggeration of murderous intent, but the physical death of sentient beings—is the central presence in the poem, as necessary to the queasy terror it generates as it is to the poem’s coherence. Just as necessary to the poem is the presence of an utterly inhuman, inhumane, seductive, and powerful controlling force—God,
within the poem, but, by extension, whatever belief or attitude offers us exemption from our animal nature and from the slippery common ground of human mortality. I am proposing, then, reading “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –” as a manifesto for accepting our necessary limitations. Against the speaker and the narrative, the poem itself prepares the reader to resist the temptations of transcendence and to take up willingly a position within the living, mortal world" (Mayer 539).

Mayer, Nancy. "Reloading That Gun: Reading An Old Poem As If It Matters." Hudson Review 57.4 (2005): 537-549. Academic Search Premier. Web. 27
      Mar. 2015.


“Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” (506)
  • Why alabaster?
  • What's the roof of satin?
“Because I could not stop” (531)
  • Time, again.  How does time work as a metaphor in this poem?
“I Reckon” (532)
  • Where does she place poets in the grand scheme of things?

Group Work
  1. Explain the connections between "I Died for Beauty" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  Have some fun.
  2. Dickinson's poetry is often considered sui generis -- of its own kind.  Is that true?  Are there no antecedents?  Cast your eyes back on the poetry we've read and prove the critics wrong.
  3. How would you describe Dickinson's view of death?  What's her vision of the afterlife?
Harvard and Amherst libraries, which hold the majority of Dickinson manuscripts and emphemra, have "reconciled their differences" and worked together to set up an Emily Dickinson Archive.  This is the place to go for all things Dickinson

A great place to start background research on Dickinson is to use the Dickinson Electronic Archives, an online compendium of manuscripts, essays, and other information on Dickinson and her times.

Interesting discussion of "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" from Studio 360.  Worth a listen.

1891 essay by Thomas Wentworth Higginson discussing his correspondence with Dickinson.  Wonderful evocation of her life from someone who knew her.



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Arnold “Dover Beach” (104); Browning “My Last Duchess” (329); Adair “Peeling an Orange” (111)

If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.
— John Ruskin  Letter to Henry Acland (24 May 1851).

"Dover Beach"
  • What words could connote religion in the poem?
  • Consider the movement of the poem: how does the tone of the beginning match the tone at the end?
  • Why is the sound of the waves sad?
  • What function does the sound of the waves serve in the poem? (end of first and second stanza)
  • Water imagery?  Why?
  • What's the Sea of Faith?  Where is it on the map?
  • Love poem?  How so?
"There is, first, the well-known Arnold melancholy: the man of little faith in a world of no faith, who still hopes to maintain the spiritual dignity which the world of no faith now seems to deny him. There is also the typical nineteenth-century didactic formula which Arnold rarely failed to use by allowing his 'poetic' observer to extort symbolic instruction from a natural scene. Finally there is here as elsewhere the mixture, perhaps the strange confusion, between a poetic diction and a diction that is modern, almost prosaic" (Krieger).

"And here the sea is used much as, for example, Conrad and Melville use it. Its superficial placidity, which beguiles its viewer, belies the perturbed nature, the 'underground' quality, of its hidden depths. As the more intimate, more aware, and more concerned faculty of hearing is introduced, the turmoil of sea meeting land becomes sensible. The shift in tone from the earlier portion of the stanza is made obvious by Arnold's use of 'grating roar' immediately after the appeal to the ear has been made" (Krieger).

Krieger, Murray. "Dover Beach and the Tragic Sense of Eternal Recurrence." Critics on Matthew Arnold: Readings in Literary Criticism. Ed. Jacqueline E. M. Latham. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973. 40-47. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 94. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.

"It is important from the start to draw attention to 'reflection', because his poems nearly always are, even if now explicitly, second-order reflections on the nature or meaning of certain kinds of experience, rather than expressions or records of that experience itself. When Arnold spoke, famously, of modern poetry as 'the dialogue of the mind with itself' (i. 1), he coined a phrase that irresistibly asks to be applied to his own writing. At the same time, and in a spirit with which later generations have become more rather than less familiar, the poetry frequently expresses a desperate, eternally self-defeating desire to escape from this unending round of intellection, from being 'prisoners of our consciousness' (200)" (Collini).

Collini, Stefan. "Arnold." Victorian Thinkers. Oxford University Press, 1993. 27-47. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Juliet Byington and Suzanne Dewsbury. Vol. 89. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.

"Culture, which is the study of perfection, leads us [ . . . ] to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member suffer, the other members must suffer with it; and the fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation the harder that way is to find" (Arnold)

Arnold, Matthew.  Culture and Anarchy.

"My Last Duchess"

  • What's the duke's character?
  • What "was" the last duchess like? But how do you know this; is the interpreter reliable?
  • What is the duke's view of art? Does he feel differently about his wife now that she is a fresco? (cf. "I call/ That piece a wonder, now" 2, last lines about "Taming a sea horse") Is there any relation between his feelings about art and his feelings about his wife?
  • Why repeat (2, 47) "as if alive"
  • What do you make of the interruptions 22, 32, 37?
  • What's the meaning of lines 34-35?
  • What's the last image -- of the bronzed sea horse -- mean?
  • What might a political reading of this poem take into consideration? Note, especially, lines 33-34; 39-43.
  • feminist reading?
  • psychoanalytic reading? (fetishes, repression, subconscious, word slip ["Taming a sea horse"])

"Peeling an Orange"

  • Can you tell the genders of the two people? How?
  • Why The World’s Illusion? What’s the connotations of the title
  • Why is one of the people crying?
  • How does this effect your vision of the scene (i.e. does it modify the idea of them nude)
  • How does the language of the poem connect to the actions (i.e. rich colorful language – "sensual" in the full meaning of the word)
  • What as the act of sex become to these people?
  • Given the last two lines, what’s the tone of this poem?

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Stevens “Anecdote of the Jar” (517); Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow” (142) “This is Just to Say” (142)

Stevens' poetry highlights"The vividness of the imagination in the dullness of a pallid reality" Ronald Sukenick

On his "Disillsionment of Ten O'Clock" -- "Only the drunkard, the irrational [Stevens once wrote that "Poetry must be irrational] man, who is in touch with the unconscious -- represented here, and often elsewhere, by the sea -- can awake his own passionate nature until his blood is mirrored by the very weather." Edward Kessler.

Stevens offers a tentative definition of the purpose of poetry in his letters: "the desire to contain the world wholly within one's own perception of it" (Stevens 501)

Wrote in a letter to a publisher which requested a biography and statement of the major themes of his work

"The author's work suggests the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment. In the creation of any such fiction, poetry would have a vital significance. There are many poems relating to the intersections between reality and the imagination, which are to be regarded as marginal to this central theme" (Stevens 820) letter

epistemology (Greek, epistēmē, knowledge) 

The theory of knowledge. Its central questions include the origin of knowledge; the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so; the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error; the possibility of universal scepticism; and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All of these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the nature of experience and meaning. It is possible to see epistemology as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the job of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, so that the resulting edifice can be shown to be sound. This metaphor favours some idea of the ‘given’ as a basis of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference as a method of construction (see also foundationalism, protocol statements). The other metaphor is that of a boat or fuselage, that has no foundations but owes its strength to the stability given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea of a basis in the ‘given’, favours ideas of coherence and holism, but finds it harder to ward off scepticism.

The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts began with Plato's view in the Theaetetus that knowledge is true belief plus a logos. For difficulties see Gettier examples. For further issues see confirmation theory, empiricism, feminism, naturalized epistemology, protocol statements, rationalism, relativism, reliabilism.

Blackburn, Simon. "epistemology." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2008, Oxford Reference, accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

How you find Stevens' work according with this definition?


Stevens “Anecdote of the Jar” (517)

  • Why a lowly jar? How could it induce such a change in perception?
  • What's the wilderness's (nature's) reaction to this jar? Why?
  • What is "dominion"?
“Sunday Morning” (570)
  1. On "Sunday Morning:" Religion, death, and nature: how do images of these three "things" function in the poem? What do they signify? After getting these straight in your head, how do these images cohere into a reading of the poem? What is the theme? What is the poem "saying"?
Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow” (142)
  1. Linda Wagner-Martin writes that Williams

    presented [. . .] images unapologetically. His purpose was not to point a moral or teach a lesson; rather, he wanted his readers to see through his eyes the beauty of the real. He was content to rest with the assumption that the reader could duplicate [his] own sense of importance of red wheelbarrows and the green glass between hospital walls, and thereby dismiss the need for symbolism. As he said succinctly in Paterson, "no ideas but in things."

Do you see this idea of presenting images themselves in his work? Do you think such an approach works? Do the ideas come from the things?



“This is Just to Say” (142)



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Yeats “Second Coming” (594); “Sailing to Byzantium” (595); Szymborska “The End and the Beginning” (>Course Documents>Readings #6)

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Poetry Month Readings

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Harlem Renaissance 423-464

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Hayden “Those Winter Sundays” (48); Lux “A Little Tooth”  (>Course Documents>Readings #7); Ethridge “Hard Rock” (32);  Synder “A Mongoloid” (110); Bishop “The Moose” (>Course Documents>Readings #7)

"A Mongoloid Child Handling Shells on the Beach" (655)

  • how is the child like the sea? How is she unlike the other children?
  • Who or what is the "they" in line 4? The girl and the seashells
  • what words which quiet and peace are in the poem? Which of noise?
  • what is the "sea's/small change"? The sea shells What are "its slow vowels." The sound of the ocean in the sea shells.
  • Why are the sea shells "broken bits" of the sea itself?
  • Question 3: What do the differences between the sea and surf contribute to the poem?
  • What's the tone of this poem? Does it contribute to the meaning?


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Poetry Today: selections from the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and whatever other current works we can find.

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Bishop “One Art” “The Fish” (>Course Documents>Readings #7); Rich “Diving Into the Wreck” (193); Cope “Engineer’s Corner” (409)




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© David Bordelon 2015