{"id":76,"date":"2017-09-10T20:44:02","date_gmt":"2017-09-10T20:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=76"},"modified":"2021-08-18T15:19:19","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T19:19:19","slug":"the-sea-of-sunset-poetic-language-and-dickinsons-authorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2017\/09\/10\/the-sea-of-sunset-poetic-language-and-dickinsons-authorship\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Sea of Sunset”, Poetic Language, and Dickinson’s Authorship"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cThe Sea of Sunset\u201d by Emily Dickinson<\/p>\n

This is the land the sunset washes,<\/p>\n

These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;<\/p>\n

Where it rose, or whither it rushes,<\/p>\n

These are the western mystery!<\/p>\n

\n

Night after night her purple traffic\/<\/p>\n

Strews the landing with opal bales;<\/p>\n

Merchantmen poise upon horizons,<\/p>\n

Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I decided to close read a poem by Emily Dickinson called \u201cThe Sea of Sunset\u201d. I chose it at random, and I had never read it before. The poem is only eight lines and two stanzas long, but its language is not abrupt or staccato, but flowing and a little flowery. First I read the poem a few times and jotted down notes, then I read Stanley Fish\u2019s article about poetic language from his \u201cReader-Response Theory\u201d and recorded my thoughts, then I read it out loud and did the same.<\/p>\n

My first thought was that the poem has color. I couldn\u2019t read it without seeing the \u201cYellow Sea\u201d (line 2), \u201cpurple traffic\u201d (line 5) or \u201copal bales\u201d (line 6) in my mind\u2019s eye. The poem reminds me of a fish\u2019s scale, or a beautiful phosphorescent shell. You could probably find both of these items on \u201cThe Sea of Sunset\u201d, even though she never explicitly mentions fish or seashells. \u00a0Dickinson\u2019s words expand upon themselves in the mind without her having to use more than 8 lines to elaborate on the scene. The colors in the poem are given an ethereal sheen by her word choice, such as \u201cfairy sails\u201d (line 8) and the words \u201cdip, and vanish\u201d in the same line evoke an ephemeral feeling, as though this moment is simultaneously otherworldly and fleeting. This perfect moment on the beach can\u2019t last forever. Even if she hadn\u2019t named the poem \u201cThe Sea of Sunset\u201d, I probably would still have pictured sunset as the setting. It\u2019s perfectly evocative of the yellow and purple hues of the poem, the fairy-like fluttering of sails, and the sense that this feeling won\u2019t last, that it will soon be dark.<\/p>\n

Even though the language evokes a fairy tale, she uses some particular words that ground the poem in our reality. For example, the speaker says, \u201cmerchantmen poise upon horizons\u201d (line 7). \u00a0Referring to humans sailing upon this effervescent sea anchors the otherworldly poem to the world in which we live. Additionally, she names the sea \u201cthe Yellow Sea\u201d (line 2), capitalizing \u201cYellow\u201d and \u201cSea\u201d. If she had not capitalized it, I might have glossed by it as another colorful and picturesque phrase, but since she did choose to capitalize it, she named it. This grounded the scene in real life, even if she did not mean to refer to the actual Yellow Sea. The \u201creal\u201d Yellow Sea is the northern part of the East China Sea. However, I do not believe she meant to refer to this sea, because a couple lines down, the speaker wonders \u201cwhere it rose, or whither it rushes, These are the western mystery!\u201d (lines 3-4). The word \u201cwestern\u201d really sticks out to me. This \u201csea of sunset\u201d could fathomably be anywhere; why is it a western mystery? \u201cWhere it rose, or whither it rushes\u201d seems to be questions of origin, how it got there, and how far it flows to. Either the speaker is saying that the sea is itself geographically western, or that the questions of how the sea got there and where it flows to are specifically \u201cwestern\u201d questions. I\u2019m not sure about which one the speaker means. Additionally, the question of \u201cwhither it rushes\u201d forces us as readers to imagine the size of the Sea of Sunset, expanding our minds horizons as we imagine the vast and glittering sea.<\/p>\n

After reading the Fish article, I wondered, what poetic qualities does it have? Fish says, \u201c\u2026you know a poem when you see one because its language displays the characteristics that you know to be proper to poems\u201d. Immediately, the punctuation comes to mind. She uses commas and semicolons liberally, as do plenty of poets, but Dickinson specifically uses exclamation points in almost all <\/em>of her poems, which is not as characteristic of a poem as are commas and semi-colons. The exclamation points give her poems a child-like, straightforward quality. This reminded me of the intentional fallacy. I think poems, by their nature, are probably especially susceptible to the intentional fallacy, because they almost always use \u201cpoetic language\u201d, words with multiple meanings, or have meaning hidden in their form. However, I do not find this to be true with Dickinson\u2019s authorship. I could be (and probably am) wrong, but I think a lot of her poetry is straightforward, or about what it seems to be about. After reading the poem out loud, it\u2019s clear that it doesn\u2019t all rhyme perfectly, but I think the length of the poem allows for that.<\/p>\n

In the future, I want to examine the significance of the fact that she is a successful American female poet, perhaps in conjunction with Fetterley\u2019s article about American female writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Sea of Sunset\u201d by Emily Dickinson This is the land the sunset washes, These are the banks of the Yellow Sea; Where it rose, or whither it rushes, These are the western mystery! Night after night her purple traffic\/ Strews the landing with opal bales; Merchantmen poise upon horizons, Dip, and vanish with fairy … Continue reading “The Sea of Sunset”, Poetic Language, and Dickinson’s Authorship<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3036,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145910,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog-posts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3036"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}