A Day_Emily Dickinson

                            A Day_Emily Dickinson

Understanding the text 

Answer the following questions.

a.

How does the poet describe the morning sun in the first stanza?

The poet describes the morning sun as a ribbon and casts the purple shadow of the steeple. The rise of the sun spreads as the news. 

b.

What does the line ‘The news like squirrels ran’ mean?

The line 'The news like squirrels ran' means, as soon as the sun rises its news gets spread all around like a squirrel. No one can hide it.

c.

What do you understand by the line ‘The hills untied their bonnets’?

I think when the sun rises, hills get revealed slowly as a baby removes the bonnet. By this, I understand that the sun slowly showers its light upon the hill and the hill appears clearly and beautifully in the morning.

d.

Is the speaker watching the morning sun? Why? Why not?

The poet's position is ambivalent as she seems to explain how does it feel like to watch a sun that is rising and setting. It also can be both the generic sense when she has observed the sun rising but she doesn't know how it sets.  The reason for that is, firstly she says,"I’ll tell you how the sun rose" the statement shows she has seen the sun rising but in the second stanza she said that she didn't know how the sunset. 

e.

How does the sun set?

The poetic person is not sure how the sun sets. As she says, "But how he set, I know not". Yet she has tried to explain how it might have been seen.  It has made stile purple and it seemed grey while children gently moved away.

.

 Reference to the context

a.

What, according to the speaker, is a day?

According to the speaker, a day is a childhood. It is imagery that stands for childhood innocence.

b.

What purpose does the hyphen in the first line serve in the poem?

The use of dashes stresses and personifies common nouns like the ribbon in the poem.

While Dickinson’s dashes often stand for more varied punctuation, at other times they serve as bridges between sections of the poem—bridges that are not otherwise readily apparent.  Dickinson may also have intended for the dashes to indicate pauses when reading the poem aloud.

c.

What makes this poem lyrical and sonorous? Discuss.

The experimental rhyme makes it sonorous and her personal feelings regarding life and death make it lyrical. As with meter, Dickinson’s employment of rhyme is experimental and often not exact. A rhyme that is not perfect is called “slant rhyme” or “approximate rhyme.” Slant rhyme, or no rhyme at all, is quite common in modern poetry, but it was less often used in poetry written by Dickinson’s contemporaries. In this poem, for example, we would expect “time” to rhyme with “ran.”

Dickinson’s poems are lyrics, generally defined as short poems with a single speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling.  As in most lyric poetry, the speaker in Dickinson’s poems is often identified in the first person,“I.” Dickinson reminded a reader that the “I” in her poetry does not necessarily speak for the poet herself: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person” (L268).  In this poem, the “I” addresses the reader as “you.”

d.

Who are the target audience of the speaker? Why?

The target audience of the speaker is both children and adults. I think its target audience is the children because the poem itself talks about the children who are following the footsteps of the teachers to learn and lead life. Secondly, I think it is also targeted at adults because it talks about death. 

e.

The poem seems to describe a day for children. How would the adult people

respond to this poem? Discuss this poem with your parents/guardians and write

the answer based on their responses.