A Day
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| Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
About the Author
- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is considered a major American poet
- While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet her regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. However, she has been steadily gaining popularity thorough her posthumously published poems.
Summary
The poem ‘A Day’ has been composed by an eminent American poet Emily Dickinson who makes use of brilliant imageries and symbols to describe a beautiful day that leads the children from innocence to experience. It is a lyrical poem which describes a day for children. The speaker is a child who can confidently tell about the way the sun rises but remains unknown about the sunset. The speaker expresses his/her feelings towards the beauty of nature when the sun rises by using sight imagery such as ribbons to describe the rays of the morning sun and amethyst to describe the colour and beauty of steeples. He compares the spread of the sun rays with the squirrel’s run and drying up of mist/frost with untying of the bonnets by the hills. The speaker verifies his/her confidence with the bobolinks’ song.
The speaker seems ignorance about the sunset which symbolizes death. He says little about the evening stating that he sees little yellow boys and girls climbing up a purple stile but he/she can’t understand why they do that. He/she sees them reaching other side of the stile before a ‘Dominie in gray’/teacher/pastor gently puts up the evening bar and sending people to their shelter.
This poem can be interpreted as the beautiful portrayal of the transition from life to death. The sunrise symbolizes birth and the sunset is the symbol of end of life, i.e., death.
Understand 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. The rays of the sun make the steeples of the church so beautiful and attractive that they look like amethyst. He is praising the beauty of rising sun comparing it with the series of the ribbons.
b. What does the line ‘The news like squirrels ran’ mean?
The line ‘The news like squirrels ran’ means the news of the sunrise travels fast. He beautifully uses the images of running squirrels to clarify the readers how fast the sun rays spread.
c. What do you understand by the line ‘The hills untied their bonnets’?
The line ‘The hills untied their bonnets’ refers to drying up of frost or mist with the rays of the morning sun. Places having high altitude, hills and mountain generally get covered with frost or due early in the morning. Such forms of snow/water melt with the sun. This phenomenon is presented metaphorically as the hill’s untying of bonnets.
d. Is the speaker watching the morning son? Why? Why not?
Yes, the speaker is watching the morning sun because he/she tells the readers the way the sun rose. He/she confidently says that the rays of the rising sun form a layer of ribbons in the air, the rays make the steeples purple like an amethyst and the news of rising sun and its beauty spread fast like squirrels’ run. According to the speaker, the morning sun encourages bobolinks to sing for joy.
e. How does the sun set?
The sun sets making the world purple and yellow while lowering to the horizon. The setting sun invites gray evening that notifies humans about the time to go to their shelter. The term ‘flock’ means people who goes home after the sunset.
Reference to the context
a. What, according to the speaker, is a day?
According to the speaker, a day is the day with a beautiful morning in a literal sense. Metaphorically, a day refers to the transition of life to death. In this sense, morning signifies the birth and the sunset symbolizes the death. Human life is transitory like a day. The speaker’s innocence about the sunset suggests human’s little or even lack of knowledge about the death. For him, death is unpredictable and not understandable.
b. What purposes does the hyphen in the first line serve in the poem?
The purposes of using the hyphen in the first line is to mark the continuation of a sentence or idea expressed there without a blunt end and allow the readers to visually move from one fragment to the other following the lines. The speaker tells how the sun rises in the first line and shows the continuation of his very idea into the second and the following lines, even to the next stanza. Though the line ends, the continuous flow his idea about the rising sun moves to the following lines without a pause. He shows his confidence on how the rises and how it embellishes the world. The rising sun has power to remove unwanted remains of cold night such as mist and to bring happiness for beings like bobolinks.
c. What makes this poem lyrical and sonorous? Discuss.
The term ‘lyric’ means any fairly short poem, uttered by a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought and feeling and Sonorous generally means having a pleasant full deep sound. Thus, single speaker expressing his perception about the way the sun rose and his/her feelings towards the beauty of nature illuminated in the rays of the morning sun make the poem lyrical and sonorous.
d. Who are the target audience of the speaker? Why?
The target audience of the speaker are innocent children like him who entertain observing the rising sun and the beauty of nature in the morning. The children confidently tell something about the world around them in the outset. However, their confidence wanes when their experiences of the world progress. This is evident in the poem that the speaker knows about the sun rising but he is unaware of the way the sun sets.
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.
This poem, in a literal sense, describes a day for children, for its speaker is a child and it opens with the speaker’s confidence about the way the sun rose. The speaker’s confidence portrays his/her innocent view of the world. The poem describes the beginning and ending of the day based the speaker’s observation. The speaker appeals readers to be more appreciative of beauty of nature when the sun rises. Morning is described from the perspective an innocent child and the setting sun from the perspectives of the experienced ones.
The adult would respond to this poem as the beautiful portrayal of the transition from life to death. People are aware of birth, can predict something and can manipulate to some extent but death is unpredictable. Thus, any living beings know little about the death.
(Note: - for better, have a discussion with your parents)
For better understanding see this also:
· Imagery can be said as language that evokes a physical sensation produced by one of the five senses – sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell
· a symbol is an idea or image that suggests something else. It is an image that transcends its literal meaning, or denotative meaning in a complex way. Symbolism makes use of an idea or image that suggests something else. A symbol is a kind of shorthand, as a subtle way of introducing a significant idea or attitude.
· Alliteration refers to the repetition of initial consonant sound in words that are closely used within a line of poetry or a sentence
· Personification is a special kind of comparison, closely related to metaphor, that gives life or human characteristics to inanimate objects or abstract ideas. In other words, personification refers to giving human qualities to non-humans.
Some literary devices used in the poem:
· symbolism: the entire poem symbolizes the transition from life to death
· Metaphor: sun rays in the morning -ribbons, sun rays in evening – yellow boys and girls (imagery)
· Simile: the news like squirrels run
· Personification: hills remove their bonnets (stanza 2, line 2)
· Alliteration: repetition of ‘s’ sound in the steeples swam and ‘b’ sound in the bobolinks began
