Americká literatura
Dickinson, Emily. "After great pain, a formal feeling comes".
Summary and Analysis
The poem is an image of a death-like state, not death precisely, because there are images of mechanical activity of a person whose "feet, mechanical, go round". This state must have been...
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Dickinson, Emily. "Because I could not stop for Death".
Summary and Analysis
(from American Literature I lectures)
The first part of the poem is a pleasant portrayal of Death as a polite gentleman who stops for the speaker to take her for a drive in a carriage. The...
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Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feathers".
Summary and Analysis
(from American Literature I Lectures)
A poem of very abstract concept, an attempt to describe the aspect of "Hope", a definition through image. Rich connotations arise: "Hope" is described...
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Dickinson, Emily. "I died for Beauty but was scarce".
Summary and Analysis
The speaker is dead and forgotten, as it turns out in the concluding line, yet she speaks. Her message is that she died for Beauty and was immediately followed by a fellow who died for...
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Dickinson, Emily. "I heard a Fly buzz when I died".
Summary and Analysis
The choice of tenses in the poem renders the speaker as a dead person who recalls her last moments of earthly life. The Fly buzz seems to symbolize death. There is an image of the still...
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Dickinson, Emily. "My life closed twice before its close".
Summary and Analysis
The speaker observes that her life has closed twice already before its close and she wonders whether Immortality prepares for her another such experience. The pain of parting is briefly...
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Dickinson, Emily. "There's a certain Slant of light".
Summary and Analysis
The poem has an atmosphere of "Winter Afternoons" which associate coldness and lack of light. The initial line may suggest not only literary but also figurative light. The speaker seeks...
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Dickinson, Emily. "This is my letter to the World".
Summary and Analysis
The speaker writes a letter to the world which never wrote to her. She lacked the information which "Nature" would tell her, which probably may be interpreted as a lack of knowledge of...
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Dickinson, Emily. "To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee".
Summary and Analysis
This brief but condensed image of "making a prairie" pays tribute both to the power of wish and power of will. Precisely it handles with the power of "revery" which comprises a state of...
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Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "The Faith Cure Man".
Summary
- Martha's little daughter Lucy lies on her death bed but Martha disbelieves the doctor's diagnosis
- she calls a faith-cure man who sells the desperate mother an expensive elixir
- Martha believes she...
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Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "The Finding of Zach".
Summary
- on Christmas Eve night, there is a celebration in Mr Turner's Banner Club
- an old black man, a Southerner bread on a plantation, drops in and looks for his lost son Zachariah
- though Zach is known...
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Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "The Strength of Gideon".
Summary
- Gideon was named after a Hebrew warrior from the Bible by whose story his mother was deeply impressed in a church sermon
- Gideon is deeply involved with religion, determined from his birth to pursue...
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar".
Doctrine
- One Man present to all particular men only partially, or trough one faculty
- the divided or social state distributes the functions (e.g. priest, scholar, statesman) to individuals who perform only...
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature.
"Nature"
"Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know." Plotinus
"Introduction"
- urges for not intermediate, but immediate...
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Farrell, James T. "Counting the Waves".
Summary
The protagonist is Avery M. Kent, aged 50, on the board of a ship for Europe. He contemplates his deteriorated marriage, wishes his wife to be dead, wishes a catastrophe to happen. Since he has...
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