Emily Dickinsons Poem
Emily Dickinson’s PoemSymbolically, the use of the hand in literature often represents varying concepts depending on what the author needs to portray. When depicting the aging process, the hands reveal the diminishing youthful appearance of the physical body and thus denote death’s approaching grip. Not to mention, time melts away as the hands of the proverbial clock tick ever so swiftly away. Also, when exploring male and female interactions, the male figure generally holds the “upper hand,” so to speak, or the control of the relationship, thus furthering the symbolic nature of the hand. Emily Dickinson uses the hand throughout poem 511 to symbolically demonstrate the control to which her character feels trapped, to express the limits of said control, and to imply or suggest her character’s only saving grace.
Emily Dickinson brilliantly employs the symbolic imagery of the hand as a clever way to illustrate the force of control throughout the poem. During the poem, she, the speaker, expresses her thoughts directly towards the man she loves, almost as if he where there in her presence or on the receiving end of a letter. Almost begging, Emily’s character yearns for a specific time frame, an answer, as to when she will see him again. With each questionable length of time, she describes the actions by which the narrator would take to pass the time until her love is there beside her. Dickinson states in stanza one that,
“I’d brush the summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly”
As each time frame grows ever longer, Emily Dickinson allows the speaker’s actions to approach an almost obsessive extreme. She implements imagery that sequentially evolves into a neurotic state of self-destruction and self-denial. Emily’s character starts first by simple brushing aside the time as if it where only a nuisance, a slight bother. Then she describes how, if the time frame consisted of a year, she would, “wind the months in balls-/And put them each in separate drawers.” Dickinson’s narrator progresses all the way to calling upon eternity as a possible alternative to earthly existence without her lover. She connects the action of choosing death with the insignificant chore of throwing away useless garbage. Emily uses the word “rind” to illustrate how life without her love would lose its sweet, nurturing, luscious qualities and succumb to nothing more than worthless and pathetic rubble.
Emily Dickinson uses the hand to represent control or lack of control throughout the poem. She calls upon the symbolic nature that the body part conjures up and uses this nature to further show the undesirable, but tolerable, control placed over her. However, throughout the duration of the poem, Dickinson never gives hint as to the possible identity of the speaker’s lover.
“In keeping with her tradition of looking at the “circumference”
of an idea, Dickinson never actually defines a conclusive love...
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