A short review of the characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry
Theme and Tone
Emily Dickinson used images from nature, religion, law,
music, commerce, medicine, fashion, and domestic activities to probe universal
themes: the wonders of nature, the identity of the self, death and immortality,
and love.
Sometimes with humor, sometimes with pathos, Dickinson writes
about her subjects. Remembering that she had a strong wit often helps to
discern the tone behind her words.
Form and Style
One
of Dickinson’s special gifts as a poet is her ability to describe abstract
concepts with concrete images.
In
many Dickinson poems, abstract ideas and material things are used to explain
each other, but the relation between them remains complex and unpredictable.
For some of Dickinson’s poems, more than one manuscript
version exists. “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose” exists in two
manuscripts. In one, the poem is broken into four stanzas of four lines each;
in the other, as you see here, there are no stanza breaks.
Meter and Rhyme
The
meter, or the rhythm of the poem, is usually determined not just by the number
of syllables in a line but by how the syllables are accented.
Dickinson’s
verse is often associated with common meter, which is defined by alternating
lines of eight syllables and six syllables.
As with meter, Dickinson’s employment of rhyme is
experimental and often not exact. Rhyme that is not perfect is called “slant
rhyme” or “approximate rhyme.” Slant rhyme, or no rhyme at all, is quite common
in modern poetry, but it was less often used in poetry written by Dickinson’s
contemporaries. In this poem, for example, we would expect “time” to rhyme with
“ran.”
Punctuation and Syntax
Dickinson
most often punctuated her poems with dashes, rather than the more expected
array of periods, commas, and other punctuation marks. She also capitalized
interior words, not just words at the beginning of a line. Her reasons are not
entirely clear.
While Dickinson’s dashes often stand in for more varied
punctuation, at other times they serve as bridges between sections of the
poem—bridges that are not otherwise readily apparent. Dickinson may also
have intended for the dashes to indicate pauses when reading the poem aloud.
Diction
Dickinson’s editing process often focused on word choice rather than on experiments with form or structure. She recorded variant wordings with a “+” footnote on her manuscript. Sometimes words with radically different meanings are suggested as possible alternatives. Dickinson changed no words between the two versions of “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose.”
