Emily Dickenson and Death

I don’t particularly enjoy poetry. I like the rhymey poetry, but not so much the free verse, because I can never seem to get much out of it. I just like straightforward words, although I do enjoy metaphors and symbolism. I really dislike writing poetry also. It’s just a pain in the rear. I get nothing out of it. I’d rather write real sentences and stories than a poem about nature. Even though I don’t naturally enjoy poetry, I do like Emily Dickinson. I’ve read some of her poems before and some of them are quite beautiful.

The few poems of Emily Dickinson that caught my eye today were her two poems about death. They were actually kind of morbid, but in a real life situation kind of way. The first one which starts with “Because I could not stop for Death –“ (p.1214). Reminded me of the story in Harry Potter of the three hallows and the brothers who met death while walking over a bridge they had made with magic. The poem has that kind of mentality. The narrator met death, who was in no hurry and death took the narrator on a journey.

The second poem that interested me is the poem that starts with “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (p. 1215). She lay on her deathbed and there was silence when she heard a fly buzz. She signed a will and then “the windows failed”, windows being her eyes and she died. This is a particularly morbid poem. However, I am not a very morbid person. Lately in my life, there has been a lot of sickness and near death experiences for people close to me that I have been thinking about it lately and this poem was a little unusual to me in that the room is silent when the narrator takes her last breath and all that is heard in the room is a fly and then she dies, the end. I don’t really see any moral or message in it. I feel like a lot of these poems she is writing are kind of just scribbles or sketches in a notebook, if you will. However, they are incredible.

Response to Libby Wandersee

I agree with you that both stories are based on motives and also how you said that the reader needs no reason if the character is insane like in the Tell-Tale Heart, and that the character in The Cask of Amontillado the character seams completely sane, but ends up building a wall of stone to lock Furtunato in a cypt where he eventually dies. I also agree with you that in the second story the motives aren’t really clear. We don’t really know what wrong had been done to our main character Montressor only that some wrong has been down and in the first story, we know that no wrong has been done, only that the narrator doesn’t like this guy’s eye so he decides to kill him.

I also agree with you on how throughout the whole story, Fortunato is made to look like a fool. I also believe that his name is supposed to be ironic in a way, because he is in no way fortunate in the story. Also Monstressor in Latin means “no one provokes me without impunity”, which I also think is metaphor for the fact that he gets revenge on this guy for doing something to him, although we never find out exactly what that is.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe. Now there is a man you don’t meet every day on the street, partly due to the fact that he’s crazy, bizarre, and a literary genius. This man was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809 and became an orphan at a very young age when his mother died and his father had abandoned the family and let’s just say this, sometimes orphans grow up to be crazy, mad men. (AKA Voldemort) The most popular of his works is the Raven which was published in January of 1845. He also married his cousin and died due to unknown factors, but people suspect it was due to overdose, alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, or some other weird factor.

I have read much of Poe in a middle school English class. Poe has an amazing talent of drawing his reader in and keeping their attention. I do remember reading The Tell-Tale Heart before and it is one of my favorite stories of his. All during the story the narrator/main character is trying to convince us he is not mad, but doesn’t do a very good job of it. This reminds me of the movie “Chicago” and the song in the movie called the “Cell Block Tango” and how they try to convince you that they were right and killing these men, but we all know they’re guilty. So the narrator kills this guy and hides him under the floorboards, but the guilt eats him up alive because he can hear the loud heartbeat of his victim and eventually confesses. All during the story, I was thinking about how whenever I did something bad when I was a kid the guilt would just eat me up inside and I would end up confessing to my parents, even if they didn’t notice or expect anything.

Though I had read The Tell-Tale Heart before, I had not read The Cask of Amontillado before, but the story didn’t really surprise me. It was another story of revenge and is twisted and evil in a way. To get revenge on his friend, the main character puts Furtanato in a crypt and builds up the wall so he can’t get out, which in my mind is way extreme. I mean if I wanted to get back at someone, I would just teepee their house or prank them or something like that, not hole them up in a crypt and let them starve to death or suffocate.

            Edgar Allan Poe is a crazy man and likes to think out of the box and think of mad ideas of how to kill people. It works to keep his audience interested, but some part of me thinks that he had people he wanted revenge and that people in these stories of his may be real life people. However, I am only speculating and it could be that Poe was okay in the head and just had a vivid and wild imagination, but we’ll never know.

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I can honestly say that I was a little confused by this story and didn’t understand what was going on. From what I got from the story, it was about a man called Goodman Brown trying to resist temptation of the devil from witches.

I know that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, but I’ve never actually read it. I know the story from what people have told me and from the movie Easy A. From what I’ve heard, it was an extremely boring and long book that was just too drawn out for the point of the book.

By the end of the story, I understood it. This story is like one of those books that really makes no sense until you finish it and then you’re like “ooh, now I get it”. The story was just this guy who had this temptation and went to a witch gathering and saw his wife there and then woke up in the street and thought it was a dream. Goodman didn’t want to sin but found it easy to lean toward it. In the end, he realized sin in the world, but instead of realizing sin and trying to fight against it, he accepted it and just condemned all his friends and family who sinned. He can’t appreciate his life at all because of the sin he sees in everyone else and takes his sadness to his grave and that is all that his family and friends remembered him as.

I think the point that Hawthorne is trying to make is that you have to accept that not all people are perfect. Everyone sins. If you only look at the sin in life then your life will be unhappy, but you should try to focus on the positive things and not dwell on sin.

William Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man

I have read William Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man in a previous class and really quite enjoy him. I really enjoyed reading this text for a second time a believe that I got a little more out of it than when I read it the first time. I appreciate his use of scripture, which he uses a lot of in this text because he was an ordained minister.

I know that not much is known about William Apess and what is known comes from his autobiography A Son of the Forest. I believe that he was born in a tribe somewhere in Massachusetts and also he ran away when he was 15 and joined the militia in New York and fought in the War of 1812. He was ordained as a minister somewhere around 1830 and in the same year, he published his autobiography.

There are a few things I like and dislike about Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man. What I do like is, as I said before, his use of scripture to back-up his argument. I also liked how h was calling you out on your actions or the actions of the whites in his day. What I didn’t like was that it felt way to much like an essay, because of the format of it and felt too impersonal. I also didn’t really like that he asked like 10 questions in every paragraph. The questions he asks are rhetorical, but I believe he kind of over does it a little. I think the same can be said for the amount of scripture he uses. He went a little overboard on it. However, it does drive home his point of how the whites back then needed to man up and stop being such hypocrites, so I can forgive him of that.