Dr. Campbell
English 381
Close Reading Group Project: Emily Dickinson

Directions: During our next few classes, you will be meeting with a group of your classmates to complete the following exercise. Your task as a group will be to present this poem and to analyze it for the class as a whole.

You should plan to do some preliminary analysis of the poem and be ready to discuss it in your group after a few minutes of group planning. Also, plan to bring a dictionary to class.

280 "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"

465 “I heard a Fly buzz

258 "There's a certain slant of light"

754 “My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun”

1. Erin Gorsuch

Andrew Prenger

Tom Johnson

Chris Findeisen

2. Justin Hopkins

Michelle Cardenas

Crystal Gwinn

Marnie Sweat

3. Stacey Kellman

 

Brittany Baynes

Scott Powell

4. Nick Anderson

 

Erin Hannon

Kim Phillips

5. Holly Shelton

 

Sara Clark

Drew Law


712 “Because I could not stop for Death”

501 “This World is not Conclusion”

732 “She rose to His Requirement—dropt”

303 “The Soul selects her own Society”

1. Joannie Wilbur

Laura West

Colin Dole

Diane Woo

2. Nicole Iverson

Danny Garner

Steven Holmes

Benjamin Darling

3. Sara Wike

Tim Roe

 

Scott Grose

4. Nick Cail

Jessica Buley

 

Michelle Primley

5. Nikki Dunbar

Schuyler Lystad

 

Allison Lambert

1. First, read the poem silently and also aloud, preferably more than once. What is the overall idea of the poem? Its situation? Its speaker? How would you paraphrase its meaning? Refer to the page on reading Dickinson’s poetry for additional questions.

2. Examine the poem line by line and word by word, looking especially at her syntax. At what points does Dickinson invert normal word order? Does she juxtapose words in an unusual way? Do you see examples of her elliptical style (in other words, does she leave out words from parallel constructions? verbs? other words that would normally be included in a sentence?)?

3. What words struck you as most effective or unusual? How and why are they used?

4. What kinds of imagery does Dickinson use here? Visual? Tactile? Auditory? Olfactory? Thermal? Does she use synesthesia? For what effect?

5. What kinds of figurative language does Dickinson use? Simile? Metaphor? Metonymy? Personification? For what purposes? Does she use extended metaphors?

6. What use does she make of sound in this poem? Of slant rhyme? True rhyme? What is the poem’s meter, and how does that affect the reader’s experience of it?

7. What words is she using in an unusual or archaic sense? (Your dictionary will be helpful here.)