ENG 205 week 10 Unit A: Emily Dickinson

ENG 205 week 10 Unit A: Emily Dickinson essay

ENG 205 week 10 Unit A: Emily Dickinson

WRITE THIS ESSAY FOR ME

Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your paper.

Get Help Now!

ENG 205 week 10 Unit. Note:  your textbook is one of the few general anthologies that gives Dickinson her due: there are close to 30 pages of her poetry included.  (She wrote over 1,770 poems total, so it’s still a tiny slice of her work.)  The poems are quite short & you might find that reading them in little sips is the best way to get to know Dickinson’s unique voice and her interpretation of the world around her.

Discussion question

Simple enough:  choose one (1) of Dickinson’s poems and do a close reading / explication.

Make sure you type out the poem in your DB post, so your readers can easily refer to it.

What is a Poetry Explication?

A poetry explication takes readers through the poem, explaining what it is about (narrative/plot), its meaning (or theme) and the ways the poetic structure (form, rhythm, rhyme, figurative language, imagery) informs and shapes its meaning.  It is a “guided tour” through a poem, an argument defending a particular interpretation of the poem.

Here is a link, “How to Explicate a Poem” from Sara Lundquist at the University of Toledo, which provides vocabulary and 2 examples you might find useful.

https://engl.utoledo.edu/english/?page_id=733

2. Write responses for other three student’s work. (50-75 words each)

 First Student:

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” we are introduced to an interesting character, Lady Madeline. In the short story, she can really only be described as a spirit or a ghost of the House of Usher. We are asked to identify if Lady Madeline was a real human-being or just a figment of the Usher’s and the narrator’s imagination. Based off the context of the story, I would say that Lady Madeline was not real. She did not speak and the Usher Roderick seemed to describe her life to the narrator at all times.

When the narrator came into contact with Lady Madeline for the first time, he described her appearance as, “Her figure, her air, her features — all, in the very minutest development were those –were identically were identically those of the Roderick Usher who sat beside me” (pg. 1177). I believe that the reason that the narrator described Lay Madeline to be the “twin” of Roderick Usher was because the Usher created a psychological form of himself to express the pain and sorrow that he is currently feeling within himself. I think that the narrator understood this and treated the situation as if it was realistic. When the narrator discovered that Lady Madeline had passed away, he did not seem to react as a normal person would to such devastating news. However, he carried on by being there for the Usher at all times and not speaking of the mystical being.

 Second student:

I believe that Lady Madelein is not real, and she is just a figment of the narrator. This is because the relationship that Roderick has with Madeline goes against the typical perception of reality, and also the narrators reactions, which suggest that the narrator may have distorted perceptions of reality. Ideally, the narrator claims to have growth together with Usher becoming best friends. The expectation is that then, he should be aware of Madeline as Usher’s twin sister. Nonetheless, it is clear that he had never seen Madeline before; he notes a striking similitude when he first sees them upon Madeline death when placing her on the tomb and is shocked, claiming that they could have been twins, as if he was not aware. This shows narrator’s deviation from reality considering that as Usher’s best childhood friend, he could have known that Usher had a twin.

My assumption is that Madaline is a psychological twin/split personality to Usher and the narrator is aware of this. However, he pretends not to know to avoid disappointing Usher, whom he must help, but in the process, becomes engulfed in Usher’s world that he too begun seeing what Usher sees as real. When he first gets to experience the split personality, Madeline, for the first time as she passes, he learns about her being confined to bed; he experiences a sense of dread. This implies that he becomes aware of the intensity of Usher’s psychological condition. Gradually, his perceptions equally become unreal, as he describes the house as living body and the windows as ‘eyelike.’

All along, the narrator makes Usher and Madeline appear as two people, with different personalities—completely different from each other. Usher is a boy, mentally and physically weak and the dominant speaker. In contrast, Madeline is a girl, her strength overtakes Usher and she never speaks. Nonetheless, we know they are split personalities or psychological twins that make them only one individual because of the fact that the narrator never knew of Madeline despite growing with Usher.  In addition, Madeline and Ushers experiences are the same; when Madeline falls ill, the same happens to Usher. At the end, Roderick experiences a psychotic breakdown where he imagines that they have buried Madeline alive. He sees Madeline coming in and falling heavily on him, thus killing him. This shows that their death is one meaning that when Usher dies, the split personality also ends.

Third student:

“The Fall of the House of Usher”  is a weird novel for me after all, so I prefer to believe that Lady Madeleine is a figment of the narrator’s or Usher’s imagination since no figure in this novel is mentally health, including the narrator. From this perspective, Lady Madeleine could be a psychological twin to Usher, or in other words, she is the inner and true self of Usher and/or narrator. Lady Madeleine is inactive and hopeless on anything, and she could not find any meaning in her lives. She hates herself, or actually, it is the narrator and/or Usher’s thoughts in the mind that they hates the existence of the lives and hope to end it. Therefore, Usher felt that Lady Madeleine is sick and there is no treatment to cure because of the inner vacancy, and he deceived himself that she was dead and must be buried under the ground. Actually, this is how he feels about himself and how he want to deal with the dislike of himself. However, finally, he could not stand the deceive on his own, and found out Lady Madeleine or the real self of him came back and was covered with wounds, and had to face it explicitly.

When the narrator first saw Lady Madeleine in the house, there was something weird and scary appeared in his heart, and he had no clue to understand the reason. When he was following her walks with sights, he felt strange and stumble in his heart. Still, he did not know why the feeling. When the narrator heard of the news that Lady Medeleine had passed away, he recalled her sorrow sights and inactive walking figure and felt sorry for her. The narrator’s reaction is a puzzle as well. Meanwhile, the narrator’s feeling toward the house is unknown to us. In my opinion, both Lady Madeleine and Usher are referring to the narrator himself. This visit seems to a dream for him, and he observed how his id and supergo are fighting. Finally, he decided to escape and go back to the society without taking any of them ENG 205 week 10 Unit A: Emily Dickinson

ENG 205 week 10 Unit A: Emily Dickinson

ENG 205 week 10 Unit A: Emily Dickinson