VCE Literature: Emily Dickinson – Close Passage Analysis

Alienated from a view of faith that does not accord with her own convictions, Dickinson rejects the speaker’s zealotry in ‘My Life had stood…’. Alienated also, from the hope that sustains ‘so many’, hope like religious zealotry separates the poet from her contemporaries in ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’. Unable to access the joy of birdsong, poem 1764 also presents a state of inconsolable agitation. Across all three poems, the intangible and the abstract is made visible through objects that assume a metaphorical meaning. Personifying hope as a bird, the gradual revelation of hope as a physical entity contrasts with the description of God as a loaded gun. In ‘The saddest noise’ birds once again generate an emotional association that in this poem, conveys the conflicted response to the heralding of spring. Invariably, for a poet reluctant to engage with the human and physical world, each poem speaks of the disconnection that establishes retreat and withdrawal as a way of being.