1.Because I Could Not Stop For
Death-Emily Dickinson
Introduction to the poetess:
Emily
Dickinson(1830-1886) is an American poetess who was as enigmatic(impossible to
understand or explain) in her behavior as her poems are.Her poems are about
common topics like death,life,pain,loneliness,madness,and so on;but her themes
or ideas are not common to other common people’s perception or perspective.Her
poems are seemingly simple but actually too original in ideas to be easily
understood.Dickinson stopped going out of her home from her late twenties and
remained a mysterious figure almost never seeing people until her death at the
age of 56!She had written about 1700 poems in home-made small note-books and
hidden under her pillow;except the seven poems published during her life,her
sister found the other poems after she died!She wrote mostly in quatrains with
short lines and many dashes(hesitation marks) that make her poetry a unique
form.The present poem is about immortality and eternity.The poetess feels that
this mortal life is too long a wait before her marriage with death;she wants to
begin her real and permanent life after dying,with death!
Introduction to the poem:
The speaker of the poem is a girl
whose marriage proposal has been confirmed.Her fiancé is death.She and her
fiancé are going out for a ride in a cart pulled by a horse.First,She describes
the scenery on the journey and then expresses her idea that she has not yet
started her real,married life,the life of eternity.The idea is that this life
is only a wait before an everlasting life begins:according to Christianity,good
people will live forever in heaven after dying from this life.But,since
Dickinson says that she is in love with death,the idea is rather complicated.In
simple words,we may say that this poem is a poem of ‘suicidal feelings’.
Explanation of the poem:
Stanza 1:If we read the first two lines of the
poem as making one sentence,the poetess says that because she could not wait
for death,death kindly stopped for her.This means that we cannot decide to
die,and it is death who decides to wait for us or comes and takes us.But,if we
read the first stanza and pause with the dash(-) we feel that the first and
second lines don’t make a single sentence.If we read first line separately,it means that the
poetess says that she could not wait for death,and then she hesitates;after a
moment of thought,she adds that death kindly waited for her.The dashes and
punctuation marks that usually mark hesitation or nervousness.In this poem
too,the dashes should be taken as marking a pause and hesitation.We can fill
our meanings in those gaps,and we can also analyze why the speaker pauses in
places marked by the dashes.In the third and fourth lines,the poetess says that the cart
was carryin her and her friend(her fiance) and also immortality.*In the first
two lines of the poem,we become aware that the poetess is not saying something
ordinary,because the expression is not ordinary.We would say,”Because I do not
have the power to lengthen or end my life,I believe in fate.”That is not what
the poetess is saying;what she means is also much more complex.The third and
fourth lines also suggest that the carriage is a metaphorical carriage,because
it is not only carrying real human beings,but also an abstract
passenger:immortality.Thus the ‘journey’ referred to in the beginning of the
poem is not a literal journey but rather a symbolic one,the journey of the
consciousness or the journey of the soul.In the stanzas 2 to 5,the poetess will
describe this metaphoric journey and in the last stanza,she will tell what she
finally realized about this life and about eternity.
Stanza 2:This stanza adds some information
about the journey but it doesn’t forward it.The poetess says that she and her
friend went ahead slowly and her friend Death was not in hurry.This means that
she felt that her life was rather long.She says that she had put aside the
concerns of everyday life,and she had stopped enjoying her leisure,for the sake
of her fiancé.This means that the poetess had stopped taking any interest in
her mortal life in this world,because she was concentrating on dying and
beginning the life of eternity.This kind of interpretation of the poem can also
be related to the personal life of the poetess.Dickinson was a woman who did
not take much interest in her social life.She never came out or kept in touch
with people;she was the daughter of a famous man and her family had a big
circle of relatives and acquaintances.But she was so introverted that she
seemed to be in love with death and the next life.Whether this was true of
poetess herself or not,this is true to the speaker of this poem.
Stanza 3:In the third stanza,the speaker
describes the things on the way.She and her friend passed across a school where
children were playing the ring in their afternoon break(recess).Going
ahead,they crossed the fields where the crops were ripe and looked like gazing
at them.Then they passed the setting sun.The things on the way are symbolic.The
school with children at play symbolizes childhood.It means that the speaker,and
the death crossed childhood.Then she came to the fields,which represent adult
life and labour.The setting sun also stands for old age that follows.In this
allegorical journey,the living speaker is accompanied by death!Dickinson’s
idea must be that we are born not only with the potentials for life but also
with the prospect of death.We live with that inevitability within us
and then we die.Dickinson feels that this life
is a short wait before uniting with death.But this death is also the other form
of life after death,because,according to the poem’s logic,the speaker
will be livin with it after her marriage,or the moment of dying.
Stanza 4:The speaker modifies the statement of
the previous stanza:”Or rather-He(sun) passed us-“She says that the sun passed
them on their journey.Then the night dews came along.They were shivering cold
and chilly.The speaker felt it very cold mainly because she did not have ood
and thick clothes.She says that she had only a gossamer gown,and gossamer is a
thin silken kind of cloth.She also had a tippet but that too was made of
another kind of thin cloth called tulle.These details in the stanza add imagery
to the poem,but they do not seem to be symbolic.However,they tell us important
clues about the fact that the speaker is treating death as her fiancé .The
mention of the clothes like gossamer gown and tulle tippet suggest that she is
engaged for marriage,because they are special clothes used in marriage.Like a
maiden,she doesn’t say it openly,but we know that she is on an outing with no
one other than her own would-be husband.
Stanza 5:This stanza is a twist in the
poem.After passing the setting sun and after the coming of the night dews,it is
probably growing dark.Now,they come to a grave.The poetess again uses
roundabout expression:she calls it a “swelling of the ground”.The ‘roof’
of that ‘house’ inside the ground not properly visible,and the
cornice(decorated pillar) was also inside the ground.This is the end of the
allegorical journey of mortal life.This encounter of the symbol of death makes
the speaker realizes that this life is temporary.
Stanza 6:In the last stanza,the speaker says
that she realized the reality about this life when she came to the grave.She
says that it has been centuries since that day when she saw the grave.But she
feels that it has been shorter than a single day on which she realized that
time is turned toward eternity.As in the beginning of the poem,she says
something in an opposite manner:it has been centuries since that day,but she
feels it like a day.This should be taken as meaning the opposite:it has been only
a short time,but she feels it too long,because she is not interested in this
life.The horses here symbolize time.The poetess means that time is not limited
to this life.She has now realized that the horse drawing the cart of her
life(and her fiancé) will continue to move on into eternity.
Theme of the poem :
The poem
“Because I Could Not Stop For Death” deals with the poetess’s desire to leave
her physical life in this world and begin the eternal spiritual life of the
soul.For this,the speaker of the poem has assumed Death as her fiancé.She has
been engaged to death,and she is impatiently waiting for uniting with him,so as
to begin her endless life.
To develop
the unique theme of the desire for life after death,the speaker has first
narrates a short journey by giving us hints that it was a life-journey.She is
riding with death:it means that she was born and will live this life along with
the prospect of death.Dickinson therefore makes the speaker fall in love and
decide to marry with death;the speaker is waiting for the
marriage.Symbolically,the poem makes life a kind of short wait before beinning
the actual ‘life’ after death.The activities of this life are therefore like
the short walks or rides that we take while waiting.Dickinson’s persona
realizes during one such short ride that this life is just a wait,and that time
is directed towards eternity.
In modern
terms,the theme of this poem is one of ‘suicidal thoughts’,but it should also
be taken as an expression of the spirituality by a nineteenth century
woman.Besides,the theme of the poem can also be regarded as an explanation of
the nature of the poetess herself:the poem is also autobiographical.
2.DADDY-SYLVIA PLATH
Introduction to the poetess:
Sylvia Plath(1932-1963) is an American
poet,whose work is known for its savage imagery and themes of
self-destruction,and for the violent protest of a feminist persona generalizing
males as the agents of all sorts of oppression upon women and humanity.Born in
Boston as a daughter of a Prussian father and Austrian mother,Plath was married
to the English poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and lived in England until she divorced
with him in 1962.Her father had died when she was only eight,and she remembered
him throughout her life as a dominating man who left her a destitute,poor and
exposed to intense suffering and trauma.Her rebellious outcry against a father
image comes partly from this.In 1953,she suffered the first bout of depression
due to overwork,attempted suicide,and was hospitalized for six months.In
1958,she attended Robert Lowell’s poetry writing seminar and met the profoundly
confessional poets of the time;so her later poetry is confessional to some extent.On her third attempt at suicide,Plath successfully took her life at
the age of 29,in 1963.Many believe that she commited suicide because she failed
to define and defend herself against the destructive effects of the male-made
traditions,society,poetry,and even language!Most of her poems are charged with
anger against the male and male world and traditions.Plath sets her poems
against the backdrop of classical myth,nature and history,turning people and
family members into archetypes.” Lowell Commented,”In her poems,Sylvia Plath
becomes…..one of those super-real,hypnotic,great classical heroine”.Plath is
also usually an impressionist and surrealist poet.The present poem first
symbolizes the speaker’s father as the oppressive male,and then it further
develops the significance of the ‘daddy’ image into generalized universal
destructive forces including war and tyranny,the German Nazis and their
Hitler,science and its destructive uses,anarchy and so on.
Introduction
to the poem:
The poem
“Daddy” is a feminist poem.The poem is also partly autobiographical,because the
poet herself has said that the ‘daddy’ of the poem is her own daddy.But,we
should not take it only in that rather narrow sense,because we can clearly see
that the poem is more psychologically significant than it is
autobiographical.Psychologically,the poem is an outlet of the mad anger of the
speaker.On the surface of the poem,we see that the speaker hurls a series of
verbal assaults against her father.She goes to the extent of scolding her
father as a ‘bastard’.But on a deeper level of meaning,the image of ‘daddy’ is
the symbolic male who has oppressed the female throughout history;more
generally,it is also the symbol of all destructive and tyrannical forces
maintained by the males-war,genocide,atrocity,and so on.
Explanation of the poem:
Stanza 1:The speaker of the poem begins with
an angry attack.She begins with a kind of conclusion that the ‘you’ does not do
anything anymore.She calls him a ‘black shoe’.She says that she has lived in
that black shoe(like a foot) for thirty years.The ‘black shoe’ or jungle boot
was a symbol of the German Nazi soldiers who were(and still are) extremely
hated by all the Europeans and Americans.But the speaker is not using only the
traditional symbols;she is also using the symbols in the ‘private’ sense.For
instance,to live in a shoe must mean ‘living in a deplorable condition’.The
speaker adds to the imagery when she says that she has been living in that
condition for thirty years being poor and ‘white’;and she is also not able to
breathe properly and express her pain “barely breathing or Achoo”.’Achoo’ is a
foreign word,probably German,for ‘ouch’.
Stanza 2:The speaker now directly addresses
her daddy and tells him that she has been compelled to kill him.Though he died
before she had the time to kill him,she always wanted to kill him.She calls him
a heavy man,”a bag full of God”,a horrible(ghastly) statue with one grey toe as
big as a San Francisco seal(large sea animal).The images in this stanza give
several kinds of shapes and qualities to the picture of the speaker’s father.To
be heavy must be suggestive of being imposing and fearful.The description “a
bag full of God” is one of the not very meaningful and rather surrealistic
images in this poem.It seems to suggest that her father was not a true
Christian,because that is an imagery of idolatry.But the image of his foot as
big as a seal in San Francisco is too exaggerated and simply surrealistically
associative.
Stanza 3:This stanza is a continuation of the
image making of the previous stanza.The speaker says that her father is also
like a gigantic statue that has a head in the freakish Atlantic.She adds that
its head is pouring green bean over the blue ocean.It is dirtying the waters of
the beautiful beach of Nauset.She used to pray to get him back from his
grave;as we see later,she always wanted to get him back and kill him
again!”Ach,du” is another expression of pain.Such words and all other words
that end with the ‘oo’ sound emphasize the tone and sense of shouting in
anger.The frequently repeated word ‘you’ also adds to this effect,besides
suggesting the sense of disrespect and accusation when she uses it with an
effect of pointing a finger at him.
Stanza 4:Now the speaker begins to raise the
issue of the genocide(mass killing) by the German Nazis.She expresses her
hatred against the Germans,and identifies her father with them.She sees her
father’s image in the Nazi soldiers,the Germans and their Hitler.In the German
language,she can hear her father.She can see him in the Polish towns where the
Nazis ran the roller machines over men on the streets!The rollers of
war(symbolically) bring his image in her mind.But it is not only the wars in
Poland;there are so many other towns that she knows of.
Stanza 5:Continuing with the previous
stanza,she tells us that her Polish friend says that there are dozens of towns
where the Nazis are murdering people.So the speaker could not say where exactly
her father puts his foot,or his root.This means that he is everywhere;he is the
symbol of atrocity and genocidal tyranny.She can never talk to such a man.It is
as if her tongue is stuck in her jaw.
Stanza 6:She adds that her tongue has stuck in
a barbed wire snare.The fence with thorny wire is the signal of the army.The
sounds “ich,ich,ich,ich” is an expression of not being able to speak,because
her tongue is hooked by the army wires.Then she says that she thought every
German was he.She also thought that his language was the vulgar language of the
soldiers.
Stanza 7:The next is an image of an engine,a
roller,which the German army used to roll over the people in Polish towns in
1941.She adds that she feels that she herself is being crushed by the
engine.She says that she is like one of the Jews who were crushed or tortured
to death,in one of the concentration camps of Hitler:Dachau,Auschwitz and
Belsen are the places where Hitler gathered and killed thousands of innocent
Jews.The speaker says that when she remembers this,she begins to talk like a Jew.She
even thinks that she is a bit of a jew.The images of this stanza remind the
readers of such a thing in history which makes them almost as mad as the
speaker herself:we can’t help going mad at a detestable monster in the guise of
human being,the most hateful man named Hitler,whom all human beings will ever
curse, and condemn,forever.
Stanza 8:The speaker changes subject and says
that the blood and oppression has made the world impure.The snows of tyrol in
Italy and beer of Vienna in Austria are
no longer pure or true.We know that Plath’s mother was a descendant of Jewish
ancestors and her father was a German.Here,Plath implies that she is a mixed
blood.We also know that Jews themselves are said to be mixed blood(and in
Hitler’s,and many Europeans’ view,impure).Hitler and his German people hated
and killed millions of Jews in unforgettably and unforgivably horrible ways for
the simple reason that they are mixed blood:Hitler said that Jews will destroy
the pure blood because they are dangerous and evil.In this poem Plath is
suggesting that, that logic is foolish because there is nothing unmixed in the
world.Even if she or all the Jews are mixed,that doesn’t affect or prove
anything.Plath has got a pack(72 cards) of Tarot cards which are used by the
Jews for fortune-telling:she declares that she is Jew,and suggests that there
is nothing wrong with being born to this or that race.She says that her
grandmother was a homeless wanderer(gypsy) and indeed there is nothing wrong
with being the descendant of any race.
Stanza 9:She remembers her father and says to
him that she has always been afraid of him.She has always been afraid of the
German airlines(Lufthansa/Lufthwaffe).She has also been afraid of the
ununderstandable language(gobbledygook).She has been afraid of his
moustache,and his bright-blue Aryan eye.He is a German soldier who drives the
rollers(panzer-man).
Stanza 10:He is not a God but a swastika;she
calls him terribly black and huge swastika that covers the sky itself.The
swastika is the symbol of ‘goodwill’ used since ancient times in Hindu
communities,but Hitler took it to symbolize his ideals and rule and so it is
taken as a sign of the devil here in this poem.Changing issue in mid-stanza,the
speaker says that women love the Fascists(of Italy) who believed in absolute
rule.This is obviously an irony because women in particular hate oppression and
tyranny.Then she adds an of boot in the face,certainly an image of the Fascist
way of dominating men.They are brutes,with a brutish heart,and a savage nature.This
stanza contains,like many others,such a language which suggests that the
speaker is so disturbed mentally that she cannot follow a simple line of
thought.The change of subject in mid-stanza,the absurd images,the unrelated
ideas and the exaggerated and twisted expressions all suggest that her anger is
so much that she is not able to properly organize and logically express them.
Stanza 11:In this stanza,the speaker brings up
a simple image of her own father when she was a child.She suggests that she
remembers the exact image of her father as he stood before the blackboard.This
seems to be her mental picture of his harshness as he tried to teach her.She
remembers the cleft(parted) chin instead of having a cleft foot.The demons are
believed to have cleft feet,like those of pigs or oxen.This means that her
father did not have signals of being a demon outwardly,but she used to think
that he ought to.And though he doesn’t have cleft feet,he is not less a devil
for that.
Stanza 12:He is no less a devil for that,because
he has bitten her pretty red heart into two pieces.She says that she was ten
when they buried him.This is one autobiographical clue in the poem,because
Plath’s father had died when she was about ten.At the age of twenty,she
says,she tried to die.But she says she got back to kill him.In fact her
relatives had prevented Plath from her attempts at suicide for two times,and
she had succeeded on her third attempt.Here she says that she came back to kill
him;even his bones would do.She would take revenge by destroying them,imagining
to have killed him.
Stanza 13-14:She says that they pulled her out of
her suicidal attempts.They stuck her back to life.But then she knew how to
utilize the life forced upon her:she made a black effigy of her father and destroyed
it.She made it look like Hitler.She did so with the help of a screw and a
rack.And she told herself that she was done with it.She concludes,”So,daddy,I’m
finally through”.This means that she is finally satisfied after killing his
effigy.She has switched the black telephone,probably to prevent his voice from
coming to her.
Stanza 15-16:She says that she has killed two
men,her daddy and his ghost which drank her blood for seven years.She tells
that to her daddy and adds that he can now go and rest forever.In the last
stanza,she concludes that there is a big stick in his black fat heart.She
reminds him that the villagers never liked him.And now after his death,they are
dancing and stamping upon his grave.She says that they always knew that it was
he who was the rogue,the tyrant,and so on.The speaker uses the most angry word
‘bastard’ in the last line.And now that she has expressed her anger to the
fullest,she seems to be relieved.She says that she is satisfied.
Themes of the poem:
The poem”Daddy” is typically a protest poem
whose themes are multiple.On its surface,it is the outpour of a daughter’s
anger against her dominating father,but the poem’s deeper meanings should be
more generalized and symbolically interpreted as themes of ‘feminist protest’
against male domination,’political protest’ against the Germans and their
Hitler,’humanist protest’ against the
inhumanity of war and politics,and the theme of ‘psychological outlet’ for
relieving a torrent of neurotic energy caused by personal as well as social
reasons in the speaker’s mind.Besides exploring these themes,it is also
possible to interpret the poem as an autobiographical poem of Sylvia Plath’s
personal life and experiences
On a simple and superficial
level,the theme of the poem is the outrageous expression of anger by a daughter
against her father.This ‘concrete’ level of the poem’s meaning should not be
underestimated because all the other deeper meanings depend on our
understanding of the basic situation and expression.The speaker’s father has
died,but he has always haunted with the dominating effect,and so she has had to
struggle against it and even imagine killing his ghost.She is so angry with him
that she identifies him with the Germans,the demoniac Hitler,the Nazi
soldier,wars,engines used to crush men on the road,statues,and many other
images.All those images suggest force,brutality,inhumanity,heartlessness and so
on:Daddy becomes a private symbol of the dominating male and male traditions,war
and politics,and a mind-disturbing demoniac image of inhumanity and violence.
One strong dimension of the
poem’s deeper theme is the feminist protest.The father of the speaker gradually
loses his individual qualities and becomes just a macho who is extremely cruel and
dominating,harsh and hard like lifeless statue,comparable to animalistic
images,and tyrannical like the Nazis and their devilish Hitler.The
father or male figure here takes on the general symbolic meaning as ‘power’,’cruelty’
and ‘oppression’,and therefore it need not be taken as ‘male’ alone.In fact,the
extremity of anger against males in general is so unreasonable and
unjustifiable that the poem’s meanings are only psychologically accountable.
As Plath herself emphasized,the male need not
be male alone but any kind of oppressive force against ‘humanity’.In that
sense,the poem’s theme includes the concern for humanity.It is a humanistic
protest against the systems and agents of cruelty and inhumanity.That means,the
image of the father develops thematically into a symbol of inhuman forces.
And finally,all the
discussions of ‘theme’ in the poem should be considered in terms of
psychological causes.Whether it is about feminist protest,humanist protest,or a
partly autobiographical protest of a poetess,it is the outpour of a neurotic
kind of emotion.The anger of the speaker is not limited to rational or
reasonable manner of protest.We cannot ‘excuse’ a poet for being so indecent as
to make the speaker call her father a ‘bastard’,if we do not consider that the
anger is the cause of a psychological strain on the speaker,as it was also on
the poetess herself.
Nice post
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