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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem is a lyric, as it’s short and focuses on a personal issue—how pain impacts a person’s body and mind. As the poem guides the reader through the consequences of acute suffering, it’s a didactic poem. In other words, it teaches the reader a lesson about trauma, providing a guide for the course suffering takes and how a person might survive it. The genre turns the speaker into a teacher, and the reader—the audience—into a student. By the conclusion of the poem, the audience learns how a person processes extreme distress and what permits a person to move on with their life.
The poem’s speaker doesn’t have a name or palpable characteristics. The speaker is a mere voice. They’re a vehicle for Emily Dickinson to convey her beliefs on the effects of suffering. As the authorial context reveals, it’s possible to think of Dickinson as the speaker, but the reader doesn’t have to make Dickinson the speaker to fathom the poem. Keeping the speaker separate from Dickinson acknowledges the difference between Dickinson and her poetic personae, and it reinforces the poem’s detached view of pain.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson