Compare and Contrast Themes of Death in Emily Dickinson’s ‘How Many Times These Low Feet Staggered’ and ‘the Only Ghost I Ever Saw’.
Emily Dickinson, as a poetic writer, composed most of her works with the theme of death, the entirety of which can be categorised into three different periods of writings; the earliest mainly contained the themes of death and immortality, personifying death and elegiac poems and lacked the intensity and urgency of her later poems or their fascination with the physical aspects of death (VAN DAESDONK 2007). Because of Dickinson’s immense fascination with this subject it is interesting to compare her pieces against each other to see how her view of death changed over the years of her writing.
‘The Only Ghost I ever saw’, written in 1857-62, is an example of the earlier period of Dickinson’s writing. There are many different interpretations of this piece, the most obvious one is that the poem centers on an individual who has encountered the spirit of a person and is shocked by the meeting. A deeper analysis shows the possibility of the poem being about how the persona, or Dickinson, is forced to reassess her loyalty or belief of Christianity through the encounter of a ghost. In contrast ‘How many times these low feet staggered’, written 1890, can be recognised to belong in her later period as its theme centres on the viewing of the corpse of a mundane housewife and the physical aspects of her death. The poem itself is in the first person persona and contains a grotesque dreary tone; and from the poem’s fascination with the corpse we can see Dickinson’s frustration and obsession with death.
Concerning the form and structure of ‘The Only Ghost I ever saw’, the piece is a ballad, one of the two main forms of narrative poetry, as the poem uses the traditional ballad metre, which is made up of rhyming quatrains of alternative four-stress and three-stress lines. It is written in Iambic metre which gives the poem a soft flowing, lilting rhythm, this along with the many pauses throughout the poem cause the pace to become slow and smooth, much like the movement of the
‘The Only Ghost I ever saw’, written in 1857-62, is an example of the earlier period of Dickinson’s writing. There are many different interpretations of this piece, the most obvious one is that the poem centers on an individual who has encountered the spirit of a person and is shocked by the meeting. A deeper analysis shows the possibility of the poem being about how the persona, or Dickinson, is forced to reassess her loyalty or belief of Christianity through the encounter of a ghost. In contrast ‘How many times these low feet staggered’, written 1890, can be recognised to belong in her later period as its theme centres on the viewing of the corpse of a mundane housewife and the physical aspects of her death. The poem itself is in the first person persona and contains a grotesque dreary tone; and from the poem’s fascination with the corpse we can see Dickinson’s frustration and obsession with death.
Concerning the form and structure of ‘The Only Ghost I ever saw’, the piece is a ballad, one of the two main forms of narrative poetry, as the poem uses the traditional ballad metre, which is made up of rhyming quatrains of alternative four-stress and three-stress lines. It is written in Iambic metre which gives the poem a soft flowing, lilting rhythm, this along with the many pauses throughout the poem cause the pace to become slow and smooth, much like the movement of the
Bibliography: VAN DAESDONK H. 2007 Emily Dickinson Notes Teignmouth College, unpublished Dickinson, E