The Emily Dickinson Podcast: A guide for Leaving Cert English students

Hi everyone and welcome to this Studyclix podcast on the poet Emily Dickinson. My name is Peter and I’m an English teacher. I’ve also got a channel on Youtube, called MrTobinLeavingCertEnglish so be sure to check it out for more free resources and videos. 

Together, in this podcast, we’ll take a look at:

Peter looks at each of Dickinson's 10 poems on the Leaving Cert English syllabus. There are timecodes listed below so you can only listen to the analysis of the poems you're covering.

We recommend having each poem to hand while you listen to the podcast. You can find all of these poems by looking them up on Google. I have also included the transcript of this podcast so you can take down the notes you find useful.

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Below is a transcript of this full podcast packed full of top tips and H1 notes. Make sure to copy these into your notebook to use on the day of your exams!

Hi everyone and welcome to this Studyclix podcast on the poet Emily Dickinson. My name is Peter and I’m an English teacher. I’ve also got a channel on Youtube, called MrTobinLeavingCertEnglish so be sure to check it out for more free resources and videos. Together, in this podcast, we’ll take a look at her background, what makes her poetry special and examine the poems that have been chosen for the Leaving cert syllabus.

Dickinson is one of those poets that people have often heard about without really knowing anything about her or even any of her work. Her reputation as a recluse, someone who always wore white and who rarely left her own room, let alone her father’s house, has almost taken over from her poetry but there’s a lot more to her than that.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on the 10^th of December 1830. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer and Emily was the second of three children. Her brother, Austin, is one year older than her and her sister, Lavinia, is three years younger. They were a very close-knit family with Emily and Lavinia in particular being constant companions for Emily’s entire life.

Emily was well-educated and it was something her father put a great deal of emphasis on. He wanted his children, his daughters as well as his son, to benefit from a good education and Emily attended Amherst Academy, which was known as a progressive school for the time, and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary afterwards. She left the Seminary after less than a year and there’s speculation about the reasons why – in her letters she talks of her extreme homesickness and illness – but it seems likely to have been her father’s concern over her health.

Edward Dickinson’s main worry for his children was their health. It makes sense in some ways considering this was a time before antibiotics and of a general lack of understanding around how germs and disease spread. His letters to his children are full of warnings about avoiding sickness, wrapping up well and not going out in bad weather.

The biggest threat of all was tuberculosis or TB, also known as consumption. This was a lung disease that was responsible for widespread death in large parts of Europe, the United States and elsewhere around the world. It is reported that it was responsible alone for 22% of deaths in Massachusetts, the state Emily lived in, during the mid-19^th Century. And even by the end of that century, TB was the leading cause of death in America.

Despite concerns from her father and sometimes from herself, that Emily was ‘consumptive’ or showing signs of TB, she did not develop the disease. But that’s not to say that the Dickinson’s were untouched by it. Many of Dickinson’s friends and relatives died (not just from TB) including her cousin and close friend, Sophie Holland, who died aged 15 – only a year older than Dickinson who helped to keep watch over her cousin on her deathbed.

It’s no surprise then that much of Dickinson’s poetry shows a fascination with death and the after-life.

There is a point, somewhere in Dickinson’s mid to late 20s, where Dickinson begins to retreat from the world. There are many potential reasons for this with most speculation centring around a love rejection, mental illness and depression and even possible epilepsy. Regardless of what the root cause was, we know that Dickinson began to avoid social situations and rarely left her home, later even rarely leaving her own room.

This does not mean that she was isolated however and much of what we know about Dickinson comes from her letters. She wrote frenetically, to family and friends and acquaintances and even friends of friends. We see, through these letters, at least the ones that survived, a really remarkable person. She cultivates long-lasting friendships with people while sometimes scaring off others with her intensity.

From her letters there’s a clear sense of someone who is intimately in tune with nature. She writes often of birds, flowers, weather, clouds, rain and anything else in her immediate environment, often using nature to capture some element of emotion or even simply the passing of time.

We also see someone who can’t help being emotional and sensitive, sometimes even embarrassing herself with her enthusiasm. In one letter to the Bowles’, a husband and wife who she befriended, she says ‘I should like to thank dear Mrs Bowles for the little book, except my cheek is red with shame because I write so often. Even the “lillies of the field” have their dignities’.

And in another letter, she asks that they use the paper she writes on to light their lamps so that she shall not have lived ‘in vain’.

In various other letter she shows a biting, savage wit but also an intense vulnerability.

In a letter to her cousin Louise Norcross, she writes ‘For you remember, dear, you are one of the ones from whom I do not run away!’

And in a later letter to the same cousin, she shows her disappointment at a cancelled visit - ‘Your letter didn’t surprise me Loo; I brushed away the sleet from my eyes familiar with it – looked again to be sure I read it right – and then took up my work hemming strings from my mother’s gown. I think I hemmed faster for knowing you weren’t coming, my fingers had nothing else to do. … Odd that I, who say “no” so much, cannot bear it from others.’

So from her letters, we get the picture of a young woman who is emotional, sensitive, fiercely intelligent and honest. And from her poems? We get a sense of someone who is deeply in tune with nature, concerned or even fascinated with death but also someone who is innovative, subversive and pushes the boundaries of how poetry is written and what it can be about.

Dickinson’s style and form is very distinctive. We may recognise a Dickinson poem very easily by her use of capitalisation and how her poems sound. Take the second stanza of ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers for example –

Here we can see or even hear what’s happening. The last word of the first line – Heard – is rhyming with the last line of the third line – bird while the last word of the second line – storm – is rhyming with the last word of the fourth line – warm. These four line stanzas are called quatrains and we also notice that the number of syllables alternates every second line.

In the first and third line there are eight while in the second and fourth there are six.

We call these lines tetrameter and trimeter and this style of poetry is called common or ballad metre.

The poetic tradition up to this point was generally based on iambic pentameter – lines with ten syllables – think Shakespeare and poets like William Wordsworth. So Dickinson was really doing something quite revolutionary with her metre and it was directly inspired by the hymns she would have been hearing as a girl growing up in the First Church of Amherst, the church that her parents attended.

Aside from the metre, there are other notable features of Dickinson’s poetry that make it stand out.

Dickinson is celebrated for her concision. What this means is that she condenses language by removing, what she believes to be, unnecessary words. This allows her to pack really complex or big ideas into short lines or phrases. Her use of concision is like a grenade. It’s small and packed tight but when it explodes, much like when an idea ‘explodes’ in the reader’s mind, it has a huge impact.

Another of Dickinson’s stand out features is her use of dashes and other non-traditional punctuation. She uses dashes to connect ideas but also to end lines, giving a sense of incompleteness. This works in different ways. At the end of a poem, the use of the dash leaves the poem with a sense of incompleteness, even unknowableness, something Dickinson probably felt herself and intended the reader to feel too. The dash used more generally indicates a separation between thoughts and ideas. It shows the connection between ideas as well as giving a reader space and time to fully appreciate and contemplate them.

There are of course a whole host of other techniques and tools that Dickinson uses. She uses alliteration, onomatopoeia, striking metaphors and similes, personification, among others an we’ll see examples of those when we look at her poems individually.

Although Dickinson’s style is distinctive and fairly easy to recognise, it does not mean that it’s easy to understand. Dickinson was well aware that there are some aspects of human experience, whether positive or negative, that are incredibly difficult to capture with words alone. Dickinson challenges the reader through her concision and figurative language to see what she sees and feel what she feels.

Before we look at some of Dickinson’s poems, let’s take a look at some of the themes that you will encounter there.

One of the most prominent ideas, in both her letters and her poetry, is death and the after-life. As we’ve heard already, death was an ever-present in Dickinson’s time and something that came to the young as well as the old. She would have had experience of her peers dying – both family and friends in school – and at one stage, she lived next to a cemetary which would have been a very busy place.

In one of her letters, she says ‘I notice where death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forestall his advances.’

It seems that, the exploration of death in her poetry is actually more a consideration of what comes after death rather than death itself. There are references in both ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’ and ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ to the process of dying – one the deathbed and the other the funeral service, although there appears to be some life left in the person inside. Both poems build to the point of lack of consciousness or sense. In ‘I heard a fly buzz’ the speaker cannot ‘see to see’ while in ‘I felt a funeral’ the speaker ‘finished knowing – then –‘.

In both these poems, some of her most famous that deal directly with death, there is a fascination or fear even with what comes after death. It is the great unknown. We can’t know what happens after that point, regardless what we believe. Dickinson had her troubles with religion, faith and even God. She was not as convinced as her other family members were and not as strong in her faith. In her letters, she regularly questions God and, when she was a girl in school, was ostracised for not reaffirming her Calvinist faith as other people in town were doing, her father included.

What is often described as her fascination with death, could well be more to do with her terror of what happens afterwards. The act of dying – as described in many of her poems – is a sad reflection of the familiarity she had with death but no matter how many loved ones are lost, it’s impossible to know for certain where they have gone, what happens after they’re gone and whether she will ever see them again.

Another of Dickinson’s more famous themes is one with two sides – hope and despair. Dickinson had struggles with her mental health. While it’s impossible to know for certain and even unhelpful to try to diagnose her, there’s clear signs that she suffered at times with anxiety and depression or despair. On the flip side, there are also moments of hope, exhilarating hope in some cases, and these are often allied with nature and images from the natural world.

This despair, in some cases, is linked to her fear or uncertainty around the after-life. In some of her poems such as ‘The Soul has bandaged moments’ and ‘There’s a Certain Slant of Light’ we get a sense of the depths of this despair and the long-lasting effects of it. We know that people who suffer from depression can often have moments where the depression lifts and they feel relatively ‘normal’ but there is always the knowledge that they can go back to that place. In a way, they are scarred by their experience. Dickinsons explores this particular idea quite well and she also acknowledges the isolation and the loneliness that comes as part of depression.

Dickinson isolated herself from most people anyway so when she had these periods of mental anguish, her sense of loneliness must have been overwhelming. She also captures the numbness that come with her mental distress. And as someone who know what it feels like when she is in the depths of despair, she celebrates the ‘highs’ of hope in poems such as ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ and, paradoxically, ‘the soul has bandaged moments’. Even the first line, the use of the word ‘moments’, hints that there is some reprieve, some release from these difficult times even if it is brief.

The final theme we’ll mention here is much larger than a theme in reality. Dickinson’s use of nature is ever-present. She is so in tune with the natural world. Again, in her letters, it is weaved seamlessly through her experience of the world that it underpins everything she says. When she explores loneliness, despair, hope, happiness, love, pain and even her moments of fun and humour, all of it is done through the lens of the natural world.

To capture the idea of hope, she uses a bird. To communicate the idea of despair, she uses the light. Nature is to the fore in other poems like ‘A Narrow Fellow in the grass’ and ‘I Taste a liquor never brewed’. The natural world is something Dickinson has an intimate understanding of and she finds ways to use nature to speak her feelings and concerns.

Now we’re going to look at each of Dickinson’s poems. You will have studied them in great detail in school so I’ll give a brief summary and point to some of the more interesting ideas and features that you might mention if you were answering a Leaving cert essay question on Dickinson in your exam.

This is probably one of the more straightforward of Dickinson’s poems. It’s often described as a naming or definition poem. Dickinson is trying to pin down and identify what something is – in this case ‘hope’.

The poem is hopeful in tone and theme. Dickinson uses a metaphor to compare hope to a tiny bird that sings and sings without stopping. Even when times are difficult, when there are storms raging and even in the farthest reaches of the world, hope sings. It exists. It’s a wonderful thought really – that hope cannot be extinguished. And the final line too is very hopeful – hope never asks anything in return, even in the most dire of circumstances. It is unconditional.

When we examine Dickinson’s style here we see the familiar use of capitalisation on common nouns such as ‘Gale’, ‘Bird’ and ‘Extremity’ and dashes throughout. The poem, however, does not end on a dash giving us a proper sense of closure, that Dickinson had something she could say for certain – that hope is everlasting.

One final note on this poem is that although its subject is hope and it is often referred to as an inspirational poem, there’s a hint of paradox here. In stanza 1 the speaker says that it never stops while in stanza 2 it says:

Abash doesn’t simply mean to stop or silence someone or something it means to embarrass or shame them.

So on one hand, hope is everlasting while on the other it can be stopped but only in extreme or ‘sore’ circumstances. It’s also worth remembering that hope itself does not mean the person with it isn’t suffering. Having hope can get you through difficult times – it doesn’t erase them. The critic Helen Vendler points to the rhyming in stanza 2 between the words storm and warm as a clue. She calls this rhyming antithetical – because the words warm and storm have opposite connotations – and says that this “emphasizes the paradoxical (but uncertain) power of Hope’s tune."

The next poem we will look is ‘There’s a certain slant of light’. This poem, in opposition to ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ tries to capture that idea of the quality of light being oppressive or creating a sense of dread or despair.

The speaker in this poem equates the winter afternoon light to the oppressive nature of religion as represented by cathedral bells. This may well echo Dickinson’s own uncertainties and discomfort with religion and especially the oppressive conservatism of Calvinism.

There’s a great example of Dickinson’s concision in Stanza 2 when she says:

In these short lines, Dickinson identifies the damage that mental anguish, despair or depression can do, without leaving visible scars. While also pointing towards a possible reason for the pain – is it borne of the mind or is it religion or God? And where does it cause this hurt? Well, in the brain or the mind ‘where the meanings are’. This is such good manipulation of language. The meanings that we create are us – it is through the lens of ourselves and our own experience that we define the world, attach meaning to it and the things in it. For the ‘heavenly hurt’ to target that part of us is incredibly destructive because the meanings too will be affected.

The despair or depression that is inspired by this ‘certain slant of light’ affects everything. None may teach it or change it. When it arrives, it is total and unrelenting. Despite the description of total despair, there is some hope – the second last line says ‘when it goes’ but that’s quickly followed by ‘tis like the distance on the look of death’. Perhaps there isn’t so much relief after all.

This poem is a little different from many of Dickinson’s others on the Leaving Cert syllabus as the meter and rhyme are deliberately changed.

We saw previously that Dickinson most commonly wrote in ballad metre, also known as common metre. In that meter, the first and third lines have eight syllables in four pairs and so we call that tetrameter while the second and fourth lines have six syllables in three pairs and we call that trimeter. This meter often creates a sing-song quality which generally suits a poem that is positive, such as ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ while it feels less appropriate in a poem like ‘There’s a certain slant of light’.

Here, I the first three stanzas, the first and third line of each quatrain have six or seven syllables while the second and fourth lines generally have five syllables. The fourth and final stanza, returns to the full eight syllables or tetrameter for the first and third lines while the second and fourth lines persist with the five-syllable line.

While this is a small or marginal difference in meter it is definitely deliberate and a deliberate choice by a poet is worth commenting on. What was Dickinson trying to say or suggest here

Similarly, there is a clear rhyme between the second and fourth lines of each stanza all the way through the poem – ‘afternoons / tunes’, ‘scar / are’, ‘despair / air’ and ‘breath / death’. While the rhyme is much looser between the first and third lines. We would call it imperfect rhyme and it often connects with one consonant or a sibilant ‘s’ sound. ‘light / heft’, ‘us / difference’, ‘any / affliction’ and ‘listens / distance’.

Again, what is Dickinson trying to communicate or emphasise through this use of imperfect rhyming and dislocated meter? It could very well be that she is trying to give us a sense of the despair and unease that the quality of light she describes in the poem is making her feel. She does this through not giving the listener/reader what they want – the clean, easy rhyme and rhythm that we expect from her.

Now onto one of Dickinson’s more famous but more challenging poems. ‘I felt a Funeral in my brain’. One of the biggest challenges in this poem is that there are so many ways of interpreting or unpacking the dense and concise language used.

It’s clear that some sort of collapse – either mental or physical is being described. The opening line is so disconcerting – how can someone ‘feel’ a funeral in their brain? But this word ‘brain’ in line 1 is important. Just like in Hope is the thing with feathers where Dickinson tries to pin down or define what hope is, here she is trying to identify where this suffering she is feeling is located.

In line 1 she says she feels it in her brain. In stanza 2 she says it’s her soul while in stanza 3 she says it’s her being. This tracks her suffering from being physical to psychological to being a total, all-encompassing type of suffering. She is headed for total collapse.

There are also, of course, the references to religion through the service and the bells and these could well be hints at her frustration and intolerance of the conservatism of Calvinism – the constant badgering of the congregation about sins and wrongdoing and hell.

The metaphor of the funeral itself is extended throughout the poem with the mourners and their footsteps a constant presence. This, of course, plays up to Dickinson’s reputation as being focused on death but it’s more a spiritual or psychological death that is being explored here.

Interestingly, when it was published in 1896, the publishers left out the last stanza altogether – preferring the poem to end on the line ‘wrecked, solitary, here – ‘. The final stanza underlines the all-encompassing nature of the breakdown that we mentioned a moment ago. Reason has broken and the speaker has plunged into unknowingness. The end of the poem then followed by a dash is abrupt and unsettling and hints at the unknowable nature of the after-life. In 1896, her editors might have preferred not to have these sorts of questions raised when good Calvinists were supposed to be sure of their own salvation and ascension to heaven.

A final point on this poem on the meter. We’ve seen in some of the poem already that Dickinson can be quite flexible in her meter and rhyme but this poem is rigid in its alternation between tetrameter and trimeter with one exception. Helen Vendler identifies this exception as line 5 which, if it followed the pattern should be tetrameter but instead is “a trimeter as the Drum of the service interrupts the narrative. According to Vendler, “If Dickinson had not made the merter so insistently percussive, we would not ‘feel’ the Funeral she ‘felt’. This is yet another example of Dickinson’s mastery of language and form.

‘A Bird came down the Walk’ is one of Dickinson’s poems that both personify and defamiliarize nature in order to capture something deeper.

In this poem, the speaker observes a bird that doesn’t know it’s being watched. The bird finds a worm and quickly ‘bites’ it with his beak and swallows it down. He then ‘drinks’ from a dewdrop, steps aside to let a beetle pass and then, when the speaker approaches, flies away.

So what is the deeper thing in this poem then? Well, from the perspective of rhyme and meter, it’s fairly straightforward, classic Dickinson – regular ballad metre with an ABCB rhyme scheme.

The poetic skill comes in the defamiliarization of the bird – something most people might encounter everyday – to make it seem like something almost magical and this defamiliarization is coupled with an exquisite use of metaphor to show us that despite the savagery and primal needs of nature – such as the bird devouring the worm without thought or hesitation – there is also a rare beauty that is communicated in the final lines as the bird flies away.

The metaphor of the bird unrolling his feathers and rowing through the air like a boat rowing across the ocean also makes use of assonance – the repetition of a vowel sound. Listen for the ‘oh’ sound repeated in the words ‘rolled, rowed, home, oars, and ocean’.

It’s a soft sound, almost emphasising the beauty of the natural world and then followed by the gentle image of the butterflies playing in the afternoon, making no sound ‘plashless’.

This poem then, counterpoints the savagery of nature with the beauty of it and it’s clear which one lasts longer in the memory of the reader. Beauty wins out.

Another of the more famous Dickinson poems, ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’ deals with the moment of death and, as we’ve seen already, focuses in on the last moments and that transition from this world to whatever it is that comes afterwards.

It’s worth remembering that this deathbed scene that is described in the poem is one that Dickinson would unfortunately have been familiar with. She watched over her cousin, Sophie Holland as she died when Dickinson was only 14 and she also nursed both her mother and her father in their dying days.

This poem then details the final moments of the speaker – in fact the opening line is being delivered from the after-life, whatever or wherever afterlife that is. The stillness in the room comes after the body’s last struggle for survival and the family’s noisy grief. All the tears have been cried and now there is acceptance, both from the family members and the speaker. Now they are all waiting for the king to come – the king here being death, the one with the ultimate control.

There is a delay though, in stanza three where the speaker talks about something that seems inconsequential at this point – the will and their belongings have all been assigned to other people and it’s at this point that something entirely inconsequential – a fly – comes between the speaker and this greatest, most monumental of moments – death.

The sense here is of a really annoying fly that is small but noisy and irritating. And for it to come at this moment is almost funny if it wasn’t such a serious time.

We know that Dickinson is interested in the moment of death and the afterlife but here, at the moment where we all pay the ultimate price to find out what’s on the other side, a fly gets in the way.

The fly’s blue colour takes over I the last stanza and, as the speaker’s eyes fail, all they can hear is the ‘buzz’ of the fly. Anecdotally, it has been said that hearing is the last of the senses to go in death. That sometimes people who are on the cusp of death can still hear their loved ones but in this case, it is the onomatopoeic buzz of a fly that is heard.

This poem is normalising death, taking the gravity out of the situation. In some ways it’s even blasphemous. At the moment when the speaker is supposed to meet her maker as the Calvinist tradition she grew up in would suggest, she sees a fly instead, the most inconsequential of creatures. And it is this fly that, not God, that dominates this poem from the first line to the end.

To understand this poem, it’s also important to understand the genre of gothic horror. Dickinson is borrowing from a very recognisable set of stereotypes here – the female prisoner, the ugly or villainous goblin and the sense of dread or horror at what might happen to her. There’s a particular and deliberate sense that she may be violated in some way.

These tropes would have been instantly recognisable to Dickinson and contemporary readers who would have been familiar with gothic horror stories. But Dickinson subverts this genre and internalises it to make it about mental anguish that is suffered.

The soul is personified as the female victim that has been captured and imprisoned by a goblin. The female victim is approached by something ghastly that turns out to be a goblin creature. The soul is being approached by anxiety or depression. There is of course, moments, where the soul escapes and is free and joyous but we see that these moments are just that – moments. The soul, like the woman, is recaptured once again and we are led to understand that this pattern will repeat itself.

There is some hope inherent in the poem as we see the vulnerability of the soul – perhaps Dickinson was trying to show us here how vulnerable we are to non-physical suffering such as depression and anxiety. The fact that there are moments of both suffering but also ecstasy shows us that it’s not a total despair or an overwhelming depression. There is a way out, even if it’s only for a while.

It’s interesting to note the divergence from her usual meter and stanza form here. There is a sestet and a couplet in this poem – not just quatrains. When we examine where we get the extra lines in the sestet, for example, we see that it comes after the recognition that the Goblin has had an affect on her – these two lines to extend the quatrain to a sestet are almost like an apology, that she feels shame that she has allowed herself to succumb to the goblin, in reality, shame that she has given in to depression or anxiety.

Similarly in the last stanza we are missing two lines. We feel that there should be a more final sense of closure but we are given no such comfort. These lines really emphasise the despair felt – the Horror welcomes her again. There is no escape and the deviation from her usual meter and form underlines that fact.

This poem – I could bring you jewels Had In a mind to’ is quite playful and a welcome respite, I’m sure, from some of Dickinson’s darker, more challenging poems.

The poem was sent to her brother’s wife, Susan Gilbert. Although the two lived next door to one another, they wrote to each other extensively. There’s was a very close relationship.

Here, the speaker is saying that gift-giving is only meaningful and true if the gift has special resonance with both the giver and receiver. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker says they could bring this person all sorts of rare jewels, perfumes, colours and foodstuffs. The places mentioned are all exotic. Bearing in mind that Dickinson barely left her room, let alone her town – going to the Bahamas or St Domingo would be like going to another planet.

She says that she could bring all these things but what would really suit her to give as a gift is a little flower. It was a particular type of wildflower common in New England called a jewelweed. It has tiny orange and yellow flowers with red spots and Dickinson actually enclosed one of these flowers with the poem she sent to Susan Gilbert.

She says that these flowers...

...than all the exotic things previously mentioned. And they would even suit as a dowry for Bobadillo, a sixteenth century Spanish conquistadore governor and one of the richest men who ever lived.

The humour here is evident in that she is describing the value of this flower and then seems to imply that this image of the ‘little blaze’ flickering to itself in the meadow is actually a metaphor for herself.

In fairness to Dickinson, a woman who wrote incredible poetry in near total obscurity, it is a very fitting symbol for her.

For a poem that seemingly reveals little about its author, ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ can be interpreted in a number of ways.

The speaker here is male – a boy at the beginning – and this is something Dickinson has done on a number of occasions. Using a make speaker gives Dickinson freedom that a girl would not have enjoyed – the ability to go around barefoot for one.

The speaker describes a snake I the grass. They always appear suddenly, he says, and can usually only be detected from their effect on their surroundings like the grass separating as it travels through. They are slippery customers and hard to pin down. This boy knows the snake though and knows what sort of ground they prefer – the boggy acre. This, in theory, should make him safe from snakes, but he goes on to say that they can actually appear anywhere and sometimes, they are disguised.

He tells of an experience, that has happened more than once, when out in the fields. He thinks he sees a whiplash lying curled up on the ground and, when he goes to reach for it, he suddenly realises that it’s a snake as it slithers away in fright.

The first 16 lines are narrated by a boy but the last 8 lines feel like an adult speaker. This adult is saying that they like nature and get on with many creatures but since his boyhood, he’s never met a snake without experiencing a tightness in his chest and...

This phrase ‘zero at the bone’ is an example of how challenging her writing can be. There is no way to translate that phrase. It is a feeling but if you have felt it, then you know what she means. It’s a shudder, totally involuntary, when you realise that something is on you or in your hair or near you. It’s the moment just after realisation and you simply react. It’s a combination of revulsion, disgust, fear and adrenaline. It’s an excellent way of capturing that sensation.

A final note on this poem brings me back to what I said at the beginning about multiple interpretations. While many people take this poem to be about evil or the devil using the image of the serpent as a representation of supreme malevolence, I get the sense that it could be about anyone that’s ‘a snake in the grass’ or even just about poisonous snakes in general.

This was one of the few poems that Dickinson published in her lifetime – although the editors of the Republican changed her punctuation in line 3 and she said the poem had been ‘robbed’ from her – and because she allowed publication, it’s safe to assume that she felt the poem would give nothing of her away. Maybe it’s just a poem about snakes?

This next poem – I taste a liquor never brewed – is another of the few that were published in Dickinson’s lifetime.

The central metaphor in this poem is one of drunkenness. Which is ironic considering the time and town that Dickinson grew up in. The puritan Christian movement, of which her family were a part of rejected alcohol and encouraged abstinence. This power them can be seen to be poking fun at the temperance movement and revealing Dickinson’s own playful side as well as her views on the puritan values her family and her town espoused.

In the poem, it is summer time and the speaker is ecstatic. This ecstasy is not caused by drunkenness because the speaker has tasted a liquor never brewed. The last line of stanza one emphasises this. The happiness the speaker feels could not be equaled by drinking wine from the Rhine – a famous wine region in Germany.

The extend metaphor continues where bees are being thrown out of pubs for being drunk, butterflies are swearing they’ll never drink again, the speaker says they will continue to drink more. The speaker is continually travelling upwards – getting higher if you will – until, eventually, they are in heaven with the angels and saints. Here perhaps Dickinson is being deliberately sarcastic.

Religion and following a religion’s rules is supposed to bring you closer to God but the speaker in this poem is ascending to heaven through over-indulgence and going against the puritan ways.

The final image of the Tippler, or drinker, leaning against the sun is reminiscent of a drunk leaning against a lamppost trying to steady themselves. This poem is a great example of Dickinson’s playful nature and her rebellious side.

This poem is, in my opinion, one of the best of Dickinson’s on the Leaving Cert syllabus.

The poem deals with the aftermath of great emotional pain. The speaker describes the “stiff heart” that is immobile. It is incapable of anymore feeling. The feet move, but it is a mechanical motion, without feeling or attention. The feet aren’t even fully aware of what they are walking on. There is some confusion in the speaker too. They appear to be mistaking this numbness for a contentment.

It is a numbness that is described here as a formal feeling. Formal means ‘done in accordance with rules, convention or etiquette’ and this opens up quite a number of possible interpretations.

We saw in a previous part of the podcast that Dickinson’s use of ballad meter – tetrameter alternated with trimeter – was a big change from the way poetry was traditionally written. The traditional or ‘formal’ way poetry was written was using iambic pentameter – like Shakespeare, or William Wordsworth.

Dickinson, in this poems, starts off writing in exactly that metre. The first stanza is written in perfect iambic pentameter. The last two lines of the poem, also are written in this meter.

In between however, in lines 5-9, there is chaos. The meter falls apart and looks ragged and all over the place. The critic Helen Vendler says that the formal feeling felt after great pain seems to be impacting the order of the poem itself.

There is a sense of numbness in the poem following the great pain but also that the speaker is expected to put on a brave face, that they are going through the motions. Vendler argues that it is the tension between “inner desperation and outer compliance that generates the ragged middle of the poem”.

The last stanza offers some qualified hope. We are told that this is the hour of lead. This connects the images of stone and quartz. All heavy and dull and lifeless but it is an hour – suggesting, hopefully, that it will not last forever. And line 11 offers further hope, albeit not a pleasant one. If you are able to survive this formal feeling, this great pain, then you will remember it as people who nearly froze to death remember their ordeal – coldness, almost near senselessness then rescue or alternatively, death. If we take the letting go to mean death then the speaker is remembering the experience from beyond life, like the speaker in ‘I heard a fly buzz.’ This brings special resonance to the word if in the line remembered if outlived – the speaker may not survive this great pain.

It is one of the bleaker of Dickinson’s poems but it captures something of her spirit and her intense skill as a poet.

To conclude, we hope that this exploration of Dickinson's poetry, style and background will help prepare you for your exams. 

Best of luck!