Emily Dickinson – Page 5 – Interesting Literature

‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming’: A Poem by Emily Dickinson

‘We dream—it is good we are dreaming—’ is a lesser-known Emily Dickinson poem which favours the world of dreams over the more painful reality of the waking world. Like many of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems, the American Civil War may have fed into this vision of a life lived best in the protective arms of dreams, rather than the bloody horrors of reality.

‘We dream—it is good we are dreaming’ by Emily Dickinson

We dream—it is good we are dreaming—
It would hurt us—were we awake—
But since it is playing—kill us,
And we are playing—shriek—

What harm? Men die—externally—
It is a truth—of Blood—

A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Moon was but a Chin of Gold’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) was one of the most distinctive poets of the nineteenth century. Of her contemporaries writing across the Atlantic at the same time as her, only Gerard Manley Hopkins, of the Victorian poets, comes close to matching her uniqueness and sharp eye for detail.

A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’: with this arresting opening line, Emily Dickinson begins one of her most studied and powerful evocations of grief and suffering, and the ‘element of Blank’ (as she puts it in another of her poems about pain) that follows a painful event or experience. The language and imagery Dickinson employs in this poem will take a bit of unravelling and analysis …

A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘My River runs to thee’

‘My River runs to thee’ is a short poem, even by Dickinson’s brief, telegrammatic standards, but as with so many of Dickinson’s poems, it carries an arresting opening line, and reminds us that the river and the sea are endlessly linked in one great cycle. My River runs to thee – Blue Sea – Wilt … Read more

A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘How happy is the little Stone’

‘How happy is the little Stone’ is a delightful and delighted lyric about the simple features of the natural world, written by the prolific poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86). This poem is more upbeat than some of Dickinson’s more famous poems, which take on themes such as death and depression, so we thought it worth sharing here.