Emily Dickinson's Formalist and Feminist Views in Her Poem

The basic of the three stanzas rhymes the indorsement and fourth lines--"Life" and "Wife." The second stanza yields a rhyme on the first and fourth lines--"Day" and "away." The third and net stanza offers an off-rhyme--" skunk" and "abide"--in the same lines, the second and fourth, which rhymed in the first stanza. The poem consists of twelve lines, three stanzas of four lines each.

The formalist approach holds that the view of the poem should not depend on any(prenominal)thing external to the poem, precisely this is an extremely difficult position to maintain in any poem, and especially a poem by Dickinson which features such strange choices for the words of the poem, the rhymes, the rhythms, the irony. In the first line al angiotensin-converting enzyme, the reader finds a rising and a dropping, a clue that the poet is being wry in her declarations about what the woman in the poem is going away through. Is she truly rising or is she falling? Is she gaining more in her arrangement with the man than she is losing, as the poem seems to suggest on the surface?

How would a formalist critic decide, for example, the meaning of the arrangement of the final stanza--whether what the woman "missed" "lay unmentioned" only to the man ("Himself") as a result of the woman's decision not to tell him, or whether the "Himself" even refers to the man or to the "Sea", for the first two dashes in the final stanza enclose "the Sea" and "Himself" as if they were one and the same. The sho

The Fathoms they abide - (Dickinson 218).

rtcomings of the formalist school are exposed by this poem by Dickinson, because in the look for to restrict the discussion about the poem to its formal elements, to take the most likely interpretation of the poem as an detached experience, the formalist deprives himself of the wider, more speculative aspects of the work.

Still, this poem is not a semipolitical speech, not a polemic designed to inspire a march on Washington. It is instead an orderly, self-contained mystery which two exposes the lie of patriarchy and suggests that there is something profound happening in the individual woman who yields to such an imprisoning role.

There is a collect developing, even a weed growing, which is a sign of living and can be as beautiful as, and certainly as strong as if not stronger than, some more socially valued entity--such as a wife.

Certainly the formalist approach misses the most-valuable social, economic, cultural and political elements which shout for attention (as much as anything could be said to shout in Dickinson's apparently change intensity realm). From the feminist perspective, the poem gives the reader sad insight into what is deep in thought(p) when a woman surrenders her own desires and dreams, her own self in fact, or at least sublimates them to the desires and dreams of the man in her disembodied spirit:

The woman who appears to be the wallflower, but who has hidden assets which the world is to a fault loud and self-absorbed to see--this is Dickinson herself. The woman who refuses to be trapped by the roles which the poem bemoans--this is Dickinson. She off-handedly mentions "If ought She missed" in sublimating her existence to the man in the poem, but it is clear that this "ought" she missed is much of her very essence.

Of Woman, and of Wife--- (Dickinson 218).

These lines to the feminist reveal a poetic vision protesting with powerfully calm down lines the injustice of a society and a world in which the woman is expec
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