Your Thoughts Don't Have Words
Throughout Emily Dickinson's life, she had to withstand the feeling of being an outsider because she was not the typical woman of her time. She was never married and the people in her town resented her for it. Society had its own schemas, or mental representations of how the world should be, and Emily did not fit in with those schemas. Much of her poetry therefore deals with the concept of suffering. For example, poem #378 (959) discusses the suffering she has withstood and her need for "delinquent palaces" where she could fit into her ideal world and be a part of a group because society had discriminated against her. Also, in poem #240 (579), hunger is the form of suffering that has to be withstood. In poem #122 (341), the first few lines give a sense of suffering due to society's beliefs and discriminations. There are other poems that also deal with suffering. I have selected poem #505 (1452) because it deals with withstanding mental suffering. Emily Dickinson was often in solitude and in her solitude she pondered the processes of the brain. This poem is one that tries to explain her views on how the cognitive processes in the brain work. She doe
In the first two lines, "your thoughts don't have words every day/ they come at a single time," Dickinson is explaining that the ideas, images, and thoughts of the world come by only once, and if you do not grasp each aspect of them, you will not get a second chance. They will be gone before you realize that you have lost. In lines three and four, "like signal esoteric sips/ of the communion wine," Dickinson explains what happens i the brain with the metaphor of communion wine as the whole of all of the thoughts that pass through our minds. The signal esoteric sips are the select few ideas that stick with us because they are signal or notable and they agree with our schemas. However, esoteric can also mean secret, implying that there are also secret notable thoughts that we do not grasp. We do not grasp these because they are secretly notable in the sense that we do not make a connection as to how relevant they really are. Lines five and six, "which while you taste so native seems/ so easy so to be," explains exactly why some thoughts stick and others do not mostly by the word "native." Because the signal esoteric sips are native to us, we assume that
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Approximate Word count = 785
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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