International Journal of Literature and Art (IJLA) Volume 3, 2015 www.seipub.

org/ijla
doi: 10.14355/ijla.2015.03.001

A Stylistic Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s

Poetic Language
Zhen Wang
Foreign Languages Department, Shandong College of Tourism and Hospitality
No. 3556, Jingshi East Rd. Jinan, China
merial_111@163.com

Abstract

Emily Dickinson, the mysterious and solitary Amherst nun, was one of the most famous American poets both in theme and in
technique. She exerted a great deal of influence on modern American poetry. Her works appealed to a great many readers all
over the world. The themes of her poems have been analyzed a lot. I intend to explore the characteristics of her poetic language
from a stylistic perspective.

Keywords

Emily Dickinson; Poetic Language

Rhyme
Generally speaking, poetry has rhyme to create musical effect. We have masculine rhymes (one-syllable rhymes),
feminine rhymes (two-syllable rhymes), polysyllabic rhymes and a further kind of rhyme called half rhyme.
Rhymes are arranged in a pattern, we call this pattern a rhyme scheme, such as abab, aabb, abba etc. Before Emily
Dickinson, poets stick to this convention. They rack their brains to find an appropriate word in order to keep the
same end rhyme. Sometimes the meaning of one word gives way to its sound. As for readers, they may find that
this poem sounds like a piece of music, yet they may also feel monotonous and tedious while reading poems in
such a uniform pattern. Emily Dickinson didn’t confine herself to this rule or convention. She was a valiant
experimentalist. She broke the convention and established a free style. So her poems are shocking as well as
attractive. We can get many surprises in her poems. Sometimes, readers may find her poems a little disturbing, but
they never fail to leave us deep impressions. Her innermost emotions are successfully conveyed to us. Although
Emily Dickinson didn’t obey the rule firmly, she has her own writing preference. She likes to rhyme at the end of
even number lines, and many of which are half rhymes and masculine ones. However, not every stanza contains
rhymes. Let’s see an example.
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The Stillness in the room
Was like the stillness in the air—
Between the heaves of storm—
The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset –when the King
Be witnessed –in the room—
I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—and then it was
There interposed a Fly—

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With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
The first stanza, line 2 and line 4 form a half rhyme/m/. The same is true with the second stanza. However, the
third stanza doesn’t use rhymes. In the last stanza the word “me” rhymes with “see”. It is a masculine rhyme.

Capitalization
In the above poem, we can find many nouns that are capitalized, such as “Fly”, “Stillness”, “Eye”, “Breaths”,
“Keepsakes”, etc. According to convention, only the first letter of the first word in a line can be capitalized. Emily
Dickinson seemed to use capitalization at will. This appears to be another neglect of convention. In fact it is another
Emily Dickinson’s bold experiment. These capitalized nouns never fail to attract readers’ eyeballs. Readers are
tempted to give a second thought of one ordinary word and to understand a brand new meaning of the word.
Emily Dickinson lived a reclusive life and confined herself in her second-floor room for many years. The range of
her social activities is very limited, even the American civil war affected her thinking very little. So she never
followed the crowd, instead she has her distinctive thinking and writing style. The room bounds her eye view but
protects her from outside disturbance. She was allowed to think of many commonplace things in her own way and
obtain novel perceptions of them. For example, “Fly” is an annoying insect. Here it is a lowly earthy representation
of physical decay; its appearance erases all social and religious concerns. “Stillness” in the first stanza originally
refers to quiet and tranquil situations. In the poem, it is used as a simile. The quietness before the speaker’s death is
compared to the stillness between storms. It is a kind of terrible stillness. “Keepsake” means small gift kept in
memory of the giver. Here it has the meaning of legacy. Death is concerned with material things instead of
salvation. So it is a striking irony.
An easy way to comply with the journal paper formatting requirements is to use this document as a template and
simply type your text into it.

Dash
Emily Dickinson’s use of punctuation is also original. Dash is definitely her favorite. She used it whenever she
wanted. She is a poet with her own characteristics regardless of the “rules”. Except for its musical effect, dash can
extend the whole poem and even add meaning to it. Sometimes she didn’t write out what she desired to say, just
used a dash and let readers fill in it. Undoubtedly it brings a subtle and mysterious color to her poem. It will
influence or even change readers’ appreciation of the poem. Let’s go back to the above poem. There are altogether
18 dashes in the poem. We can omit all of them and compare the two versions. The time we take to read it is
shortened and the poem becomes plain. These dashes allow readers more time to think and imagine. They are like
traffic signs guiding us to the poet’s innermost heart. Dash is a punctuation woman writers prefer to use. It echoes
to their emotional and sensitive heart.

Metaphor
Language is our daily tool for communication. It brings us much convenience, yet sometimes the fixed meaning of
a word can hinder readers’ imagination, because people are ready to fall into established explanations of words.
Emily Dickinson chooses and uses words in her own way. She can always endow a word with a brand new fresh
meaning and light up readers’ mind. Her poetic language is open for discussion rather than specific. It sets free
readers’ mind and allows boundless possibilities. Metaphor plays a very important role in her works. As a part of
rhetoric, metaphor mainly comprises three elements, tenor (for the literal meaning), vehicle (for the figurative
meaning), and the ground (of comparison). Metaphor connects the unknown with known, the intangible with
tangible, the abstract with concrete, non-human attributes with human attributes, and non-animate with animate.
Emily Dickinson’s metaphor may puzzle or shock readers as it subverts their habitual way of thinking and
comprehending. Let’s go back to the above poem. In the first line of the second stanza, “eyes” are compared to the
wet clothes after washing which are wrung dry. Eyes and clothes are seldom associated with each other. Here,

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Emily Dickinson constructed an imaginary bridge between the two and drew a novel picture in readers’ mind. The
word “light” in the last stanza also has two layers of meanings. One is the literal light coming through the window.
The other is the symbolic light of salvation (So the fly gets between her and her salvation).

Grammar
As we all know, poem is a genre in which grammatical deviations most likely occur. Emily Dickinson likes to
distort grammatical rules and express her idea in her own way. Because of the nonstandard grammar, there can be
various understandings of an expression. It provides the readers with many possibilities and lets the readers
themselves fill in the blanks. One distinctive grammatical deviation in Dickinson’s poetry is her habitual omission
of modal verbs. Let’s see the example in the above poem. The last sentence in the second stanza: “when the king be
witnessed in the room”. According to the grammatical rule, this sentence should be written like this: “when the
king is witnessed in the room.” This tone is rather definite. It indicates that Christ will surely appear when she dies.
However, there can be another explanation. We can consider this sentence as a subjunctive sentence. The modal
“may” in front of “be” is omitted. It shows that the speaker is uncertain about whether God will come or not. Emily
Dickinson had a puritanical upbringing. In 1859, the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species prompted
much unrest within religious communities because many believed that the theory of natural selection went directly
against creation beliefs. Although Dickinson's family followed orthodox Christian belief, she was influenced by
Darwin's ideas. So she had a religious struggle throughout her whole life. In this poem, she tries to tell us that one’s
death may be a most trivial event, disturbed with irrelevancies and leading to no afterlife. Another conspicuous
feature of grammatical deviation is the mixed tenses. She always fuses past, present and future tenses together,
even in one sentence. In accordance with the grammatical rules, the tenses used in an article should be consistent
with each other. Dickinson’s usage of tenses serves her emotional outburst. Her mental disorder is embodied in it.

Diction
Emily Dickinson is a great master of English language. Her concise and economical words always contain
complicated and profound meanings. She uses everyday common words in her dickinsonian way, which are
seldom found in dictionaries. That is why I like her poetry so much. Readers can detect her sparkling wisdom and
her unique perspective while reading her poems. And they can rediscover things around them and feel refreshing.
Let’s go back to the above poem. In the first stanza, she uses a fly to symbolize death and her body in decay. Fly is
a kind of indecorous and disgusting insect. It likes dirty and rotten food. So Dickinson combines the image of fly
with the death process. In the second stanza, the word “wrung” never fails to capture readers’ attention. “Wrung”
is the past participle of the word “wring”. The meaning of it is to twist and squeeze something in order to remove
liquid from it. Tears are the liquid in one’s eyes. So eyes can also be wrung dry. From this word, we can easily feel
Dickinson’s extraordinary wit. Emily Dickinson is also famous for her unique usage of modifiers. Her usage of
modifiers is always unimaginably strange. These modifiers require a lot of words or even sentences to explain. She
didn’t use the words which normally go with the modified ones. They break off readers’ linear way of thinking.
The first sentence in the last stanza goes like this: “with Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz”. Blue is a kind of color.
We can see it by eyes. Buzz is a kind of noise. We can hear it by ears. Dickinson uses blue to modify buzz. She
mixes sight and sound together. It is a very modern English figure named transferred epithet. It provides readers
with diverse possibilities of imagination. This sentence is a relish for our senses. The adjective “stumbling” used
customarily to describe only an action here also describes a sound, and the adjective “uncertain” used to modify
people’s mind here describes the quality of that sound. It adds a kind of mysterious and subtle color to the fly. As
in a high fever, noises are amplified, the light in the room takes on strange hues, and one effect seems
indistinguishable from another. Although there is a more naturalistic explanation for the word “stumbling”: to
describe the way in which flies go in and out of our hearing, the image here suggests another dramatic
displacement—the fusion of the fly's death with her own. Thus flies when they are about to die move as if
poisoned, sometimes hurl themselves against a ceiling, pause, then rise to circle again, then drop. At this moment
the changes the speaker is undergoing are fused with their agent: her experience becomes one with the fly's. It is
her observance of that fly, being mesmerized by it (in a quite literal sense now, since death is quite literal), that
causes her mind to fumble about in the world and lose grip of it.

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Conclusions
Emily Dickinson had her own way both in living and in writing. She led a solitary life in her confined-second floor
room and never married. In writing poems, she employed different writing skills. It is very hard to put her into any
writing schools. She is unique. To some extent, her writing style indicates the American spirit of freedom and
creativity. There is no doubt that she is such a poet who left the whole word a great literature legacy.

REFERENCES

[1] Alfred Kazin, An American Procession. New York: Knopf, 1984.

[2] Harold Bloom. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Age. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
[3] Joanna Thornborrow and Shan Wareing, Patterns in Language: Stylistics For Students of Language and Literature. Beijing:
Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000.
[4] Mcnaughton, Ruth E. The Imagery of Emily Dickinson. University of Lincoln, Nebraska, 1949.
[5] Thomas Johnson. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
[6] Vivian R. Pollak, A Historical Guide To Emily Dickinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
[7] Yaoxin Chang. A Concise History of American Literature. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 1987.