Download Banha University Faculty of Education English Department A

Banha University
Faculty of Education
English Department
A Guiding Model Answer for
First Grade
Introduction to Poetry
June 14 (Year 2011)
Faculty of Education
Prepared by
Mohammad Badr AlDeen Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour, Ph.D.
University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
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Faculty of Education
First Grade
Department of English
Introduction to Poetry
Second Term (Year 2010/2011)
Time: 60 minutes
Introduction to Poetry
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Respond to the following questions:
1. Analyze Emily Dickinson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—"?
(Time limit is 30 minutes; Grade is 30)
2. Define the following terms:
A. Allegory
B. Metaphor
C. Simile
D. Metonymy
E. Oxymoron
F. Onomatopoeia
Draw examples to support your definitions.
(Time limit is 30 minutes; Grade is 30)
Good Luck
Mohammad Badr AlDeen Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour
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Answers
Question # 1:
Analyze Emily Dickinson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—"?
Answer:
Emily Dickinson's poem "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—" consists
of four stanzas, with Dickinson's characteristic slant—or near-rhymes in the
second and fourth lines of each quatrain. The first-person speaker of the poem
is at some remove from Dickinson's lyric voice; these words come from
beyond the grave. Dickinson wrote a number of poems from this point of
view; perhaps the most famous is "Because I could not stop for Death—"
(poem 712). This subject held a particular fascination for Dickinson, in part
because she was interested in resolving religious doubts about life continuing
after death. In this poem, the dead speaker looks back at the moment of death.
After announcing that she heard a fly buzz when she died, the speaker
describes the moments that led up to this event. The first stanza describes the
silence of the room before she died as like the quiet between two phases of a
storm. The second stanza describes the people present at the deathbed. They
are also quiet, exhausted from their watch and preparing now for the final loss.
In the third stanza, she says she had just made her last wishes known when the
fly "interposed." The last two lines of this stanza begin the long sentence that
continues through the final stanza. This sentence describes how the fly
seemed to blot out the light, and then all light ceased, leaving her conscious
but utterly blinded.
The poem announces at the outset that sound will be important. The
middle of the poem emphasizes the silence as temporary, as a fragile period
between storms of suffering and weeping. The end of the poem returns to the
sound of the fly's buzz, seemingly quiet and inconsequential, not a storm at all
and yet marking indelibly the momentous instant of transition.
Dickinson's stanza form is not remarkable in itself; indeed, students of
her poetry take delight in finding comically inappropriate melodies for singing
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her poems, the majority of which follow the rhythms of familiar hymn tunes.
(This poem, for example, works equally well with "Oh God Our Help in Ages
Past" and "The Yellow Rose of Texas.") What makes her stanzas remarkable
is the contrast between their conventional rhythms and the striking metaphors,
symbols, and points of view they contain. Two complexes of comparison are
especially interesting in this work: those conveying the silence before the fly
appears and those characterizing the fly.
When Dickinson compares the stillness in the room to the "Stillness in
the Air—/ Between the Heaves of Storm," she conveys at least three
interesting things about this quiet moment. First, it is a temporary lull that
follows violence and is expected to precede more violence. That violence,
being associated with a storm, seems to exceed the capacity of a mere room to
hold it. By giving the storm "heaves," she begins a second comparison
between the storm and weeping. This comparison is taken up in the second
stanza by means of synecdoche, in which a part of something is used to
signify the whole. She says "The Eyes around—had wrung them dry." Eyes
signify the mourners as do the breaths in the following line. Just as the
mourners have been heaving in their weeping, their eyes have been wringing
themselves dry, like wet cloths, or like clouds in a storm. By this means,
Dickinson asks readers to imagine both the room and each individual mourner
as filled with a storm of grief that is beyond encompassing. Finally, she
reveals that the mourners are awaiting "the last Onset," the image of the storm
is extended to the speaker herself, for there is a storm taking place in her as
well, a storm of suffering that might also be compared to a battle, in which
this lull signals the final, fatal onset.
What is expected next, then, is momentous sound, the climax of
mourning, grief, and suffering. When the expectation of painful climax is
clear, the poem turns to the idea of compensation or comfort. The second
stanza says that when the last onset comes, the "King" will manifest himself.
In the conventional view of death in nineteenth century America, that "King"
(capitalized for emphasis and to indicate divinity) would be Christ, come to
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reap the soul of the dying Christian. By not naming this "King" however,
Dickinson creates an ambiguity that reverberates through the whole
experience of the poem. The figure might just as well be Death as Christ.
Furthermore, what actually appears to the dying woman is not any
recognizable king at all but a fly.
When the fly appears, a double reversal takes place. The storm
metaphor and the expectation of a king lead the reader to anticipate something
momentous at the end of the poem. This expectation is answered by the fly.
These reversals invite the reader to explore the connections between the fly
and the king. Such explorations: lead into further shocking violations of
expectation regarding meaning in the poem.
By exploring the metaphor of fly as king, one comes to the realization
of the fly as a symbol. The best-known "fly king" is Beelzebub, lord of the
flies and prince of devils. There is nothing in the poem to suggest that the
woman should expect eternal damnation, yet Dickinson seems to have made
this connection with its surprising connotations. Furthermore, flies are
conventionally associated with death; they swarm on carrion, and their larvae
thrive there. The most terrifying possible meaning for a religious person in
the substitution of a fly for a king is that death is final, that the soul dies with
the body and there is no afterlife.
Dickinson's technique emphasizes the violation of expectations. In
addition to the primary substitution (of fly for king), she enacts a similar
violation when she rhymes "me" and "fly" in the third stanza, reintroducing
the fly with a near-rhyme. Finally, she repeats this pattern by shifting from
sound to sight at the end of the poem, when the buzz of the fly seems to blot
out the speaker's light so that the windows fail to let light into her room, and
her consciousness, still apparently operational, loses its connections by means
of sight and sound to the familiar physical world.
Dickinson, like many of her contemporaries in the middle of the
nineteenth century, was deeply concerned about the truth of the conventional
Christianity taught and generally believed in her culture. Like that of Ralph
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Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, her religious
questioning resulted in part from the general decline of the authority of
Christianity in Western civilization. This decline had begun most visibly
perhaps with the rise of rivals to the Roman Catholic Church's secular power
in nation-states and had continued through the splintering of that church in the
Reformation, the intellectual and scientific critique of Christianity's traditional
interpretations of history and nature during the Enlightenment, the challenges
to Christianity's moral and political power in the American and French
revolutions, and the spread of knowledge about powerful rival religious
systems partly as a result of advancing world trade and communication.
Many of Dickinson's poems are about the various problems of faith and
doubt that would occur to a brilliant and imaginative mind in her culture. This
poem is an attempt to pierce through the absolute barrier that stands between
the poet and the life beyond death. It attempts to answer the question: What
comes in the moment that follows death?
Dickinson places herself in the mind of a woman who has died. She
relives the moment of death, trying to imagine it and the hoped-for
illumination that should follow. She finds at the instant of death a clarity of
perception that she tries to extend through that instant. Yet what her
imagination provides at that crucial instant is the fly, which ends illumination
and leaves the consciousness in utter darkness.
Nevertheless, consciousness remains. The voice speaks from beyond
the grave, but all it can reveal is what its senses could apprehend before death,
that instant when the senses ceased to operate. Beyond that is a blank, toward
which the fly as a symbol points but about which it reveals nothing but
questions: Who is the King? Is it death? Is it Christ? Is it something
unimaginably terrifying, like Beelzebub? The fly ushers the poet across the
threshold suggested by its "Blue—uncertain stumbling buzz." The fly points
the way, but the living cannot interpret its buzz, and her voice stops.
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Question # 2:
Define the following terms:
A. Allegory
B. Metaphor
C. Simile
D. Metonymy
E. Oxymoron
F. Onomatopoeia
Draw examples to support your definitions.
Answer:
A. Allegory: Allegory occurs when one idea or object is represented in the
shape of another. In medieval morality plays and in some poems, abstract
ideas such as virtues and vices appear as people. In this way the reader can
understand a moral or a lesson more easily. In Emily Dickinson's poem
"Because I Could Not Stop for Death," death appears as the allegorical figure
of a coachman, kindly stopping to pick up the speaker after her death on the
road to eternity. Here is the first stanza of the poem:
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held just but Ourselves—
And Immortality.
B. Metaphor: A metaphor is a comparison without the words like or as.
Once established, this relationship between unlike objects alters our
perception of both. In the most basic metaphor, such as "My love is a rose,"
"rose" and "love" are equated. They are not alike, but they interact with each
other, so the abstract word "love" becomes concrete. Now it is not a vague
internal emotion but an object that could be picked and caressed. We can
make the comparison even more specific by describing the rose in more
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detail—color, variety, and so forth. The subject of the comparison—in this
case, love—is called the tenor, and the figure that completes the metaphor—
the rose—the vehicle. These terms were coined by critic I. A. Richards. In
the following metaphor by John Donne, the poet's doctors become the mapmakers of the heavens, while the poet's body becomes the map in which the
ultimate destiny of his soul can be divined:
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed […]
C. Simile: A simile is a comparison between unlike objects introduced by a
connective word such as like, as, or than or a verb such as seems. The
following are some examples of similes:
My heart is like a singing bird. (C. Rossetti)
I am weaker than a woman's tear. (Shakespeare)
Seems he a dove? His feathers are but borrowed. (Shakespeare)
D. Metonymy: Metonymy is the substitution of one item for another item that
it suggests or to which it is closely related. For example, if a letter is said to
be in Milton's own "hand," it means that the letter is in Milton's own
handwriting. As another example, Sidney wrote in "Astrophil and Stella":
"What, may it be that even in heavenly place/ That busy archer his sharp
arrows tries?" "That busy archer" is a reference to Cupid, the god of love
frequently depicted as a cherubic little boy with a quiver full of arrows. Here
he is at his usual occupation-shooting arrows into the hearts of unsuspecting
men and women. Thus the poet, by relating an archer to love, describes love
without specifically using the word.
E. Oxymoron: Oxymoron is the combination of contradictory or incongruous
terms. "Living death," "mute cry," and Milton's description of hell as a place
with "no light, but rather darkness visible" are all examples of this process.
The two words that are brought together to form a description of this kind
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ought to cancel each other out by the nature of their contradictions; instead,
they increase the sense of each word. Thus, "sweet pain" aptly describes
certain experiences of love.
F. Onomatopoeia: Onomatopoeia occurs when the sound of a word echoes
or suggests the meaning of the word. "Hiss" and "buzz" are examples. There
is a tendency for readers to see onomatopoeia in far too many instances, in
words such as "thunder" and "horror." Many words that are thought to echo
the sounds they suggest merely contain sounds that seem to have a
resemblance to the things they suggest. Tennyson's lines from "Come Down,
O Maid" are often cited to show true onomatopoeia:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
This suggests the sound of birds and bees among old trees.
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