Poetic Analysis Of There’s Been A Death In The Houseby Emily Dickenson Essay, Research Paper
There s been a death in the opposite house , by Emily Dickinson. On the mechanical side, it is of iambic triameter to pentameter, including feminines. There is no significant assonance, consonance, or alliteration.
The setting is in a small town, and the speaker is a neighbor watching this spectacle, who is making conclusions about what is happening. The speaker seems to be terrified of death, because he/she is very afraid of even talking about it. The speaker could ve said my neighbor died instead of There s been a death in the opposite house . Also, the speaker uses the word it instead of the person s name or gender in the line They wonder if it died upon that . Another technical interest is that there is one broken stanza, which leaves one line all by itself. The line There ll be that dark parade sounds much more sinister seeing it separated from the other three lines talking about an undertaker. The parade in question no doubt refers to a bunch of sorrow people who make their living off of death, a living that the speaker seems to be disgusted with.
This poem was produced not to show the world that when a someone dies, people will grab his bed and toss it out the window, nor was it made to increase the WWF s Undertaker s popularity. It was made to show the world a certain viewpoint of death. The speaker represents a vast number of people who might share that perspective of death, maybe without even knowing it, so that when they read this poem they might relate to it. These people are terrified of death and view it as a process that just follows the same icy steps – the doctor, the minister, the undertaker, the mourners, the grave digger, and then poof! The recently alive are now totally forgotten from this world. That view on death may not be a very healthy one, so perhaps Dickinson wrote this poem as to be a mirror, so that the reader might see this and change.