LITERATURE

Comparison of Different Forms

Comparison of Different Forms

Introduction

This paper intends to explore the two different forms, a book and a poem namely, 'Because I could not stop for Death written by Emily Dickson and 'I used to Live here Once” written by Rhys. Both forms have different themes, one talk about death while the other talks about life.

Discussion

“Because I could not stop for Death”

One of Emily Dickinson's poems begins, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” and the oblique and often enigmatic rendering of Truth is the dominant theme of Dickinson's poetry. Its motifs often recur: love, death, poetry, beauty, nature, immortality, the self.

Formally, her poetry plays endless variations on the Protestant hymn meters that she knew from her youthful experiences in church. Her reading in contemporary poetry was limited, and the form she knew best was the iambic of hymns: common meter (with its alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines), long meter (four lines of tetrameter), and short meter (four of trimeter) became the framework of her poetry. That static form, however, could not contain the energy of her work, and the rhythms and rhymes are varied, upset, and broken to accommodate the feeling of her lines. The predictable patterns of hymns were not for Dickinson, who delighted in off-rhyme, consonance, and, less frequently, eye-rhyme.

Of importance to an understanding and appreciation of the fiction of Jean Rhys is recognition of the way in which her fiction reflects an attitude toward life often in opposition to traditional middle-class values. This attitude was shaped partly by her unusual cultural background but also by her life experiences.

She is brutally honest and darkly humorous in her presentation of the isolated, abandoned world of her women characters, who passively ache for lost beauty and passion, but who always attempt to survive. Rhys presents those women from the perspective of a displaced person. Along with her general focus on the displaced person, her writings that reflect her West Indian heritage pursue themes of alienation and rejection endured by the white Creole woman in the Caribbean and her marginalization in England.

By consensus the greatest of all Dickinson's poems, “Because I could not stop for Death” (#712) explores death from the second perspective, as do such poems as “I Heard a Fly buzz — when I died” (#465) and “I died for Beauty (#449), in which one who has died for beauty and one who has died for truth agree, with John Keats, that truth and beauty are the same the poet adding the ironic commentary that their equality lies in the fact that the names of both are being covered up by moss.

“Because I could not stop for Death” unites love and death, for death comes to the persona in the form of a gentleman caller. Her reaction is neither haste to meet him, nor displeasure at his arrival. She has time to put away her “labor and . . . leisure”; he is civil. The only hint in the first two stanzas of ...