We might also mention a poem by her namesake, Emily Brontë (1818-48). We can picture an eagle or a parrot or a crow, but a ‘thing with feathers’? No chance.ĭickinson’s is by no means the only notable poem about hope. ‘It is as though she begins each general enquiry’, Vendler notes, ‘with the general question, “What sort of thing is this?” and then goes on to categorize it more minutely’.īut there’s something counter-intuitive about a poet whose work is defined by its peculiar and sometimes idiosyncratic attention to detail – describing the snow falling from clouds as being sifted from leaden sieves, for instance, or her wonderfully acute observation of a cat hunting a bird – making such wide and varied use of ‘thing’, a word which is, to borrow Vendler’s adjective, ‘bloodless’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |