I’ve noticed in a lot of the poems that we have read that Dickinson approaches time and space uniquely. It seems like she uses physical space to suggest a sense of temporality, or maybe she uses space to altogether avoid time. I started thinking about this when we were discussing “A Wife — at daybreak I shall be” where instead of placing her future in time, she has it climbing stairs, moving from room to room. I also find it interesting that the imagery of a house itself is used frequently such as in “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died — ” where the scene is contained in a still room with windows. I myself am not sure what exactly what to make of it but was wondering what others make of her choice to contextualize events through physical, spatial relationships.
One thought on “What do you think of Dickinson’s use of spacial relationships as it pertains to time/life events/etc.?”
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It is difficult for me as well, I tried to make sense of it as describing space to also describe time as well. In “I heard a Fly Buzz – when I died -“, I feels as though she describes the room in order to describe how time is also still. It also makes me think of “Because I could not stop for Death”, and how when she is journeying through life(several decades), she only describes places/events. She does say at the end that time was fleeting but only after describing the passage of time only through a carriage ride. Yet somehow she was able to make the poem feel like an entire life flashed before her eyes in a moment. She does this thing where she freezes time but yet accelerates through many years in a moment without losing the reader and I’m not sure how I feel about it lol.