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Grief Comes in Waves

poetry essay on shipwreck

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy . They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall . Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming , and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks . Unknown, Reddit

This piece about grief was taken from a Reddit page which you can access by clicking here .

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poetry essay on shipwreck

A Brief History of Shipwrecks in Literature

Alan g. jamieson on why lost ships are so compelling to writers.

On August 14, 2020 the animal transport Gulf Livestock 1 departed Napier, New Zealand, bound for China. The Panamanian-registered vessel was carrying almost 6,000 live cattle and had a crew of 43: 39 men from the Philippines, including the captain, two from New Zealand and two from Australia.

On 2 September, when the ship was southwest of Japan, an emergency message was sent out. The engine had failed and the vessel was drifting in stormy seas caused by Typhoon Maysak. The Japanese coast guard responded and picked up two survivors, both Filipinos. They said the ship had been struck by a large wave and had capsized. The other 41 members of the crew had died, along with the cargo of cattle.

News items about this incident appeared on various media sites for a few days before it was forgotten. This recent shipwreck was one of so many across the centuries. The oldest known shipwreck, on the coast of Greece, is more than 4,000 years old, and UNESCO has estimated that there are more than 3 million shipwreck sites around the world. Shipwrecks have always been part of human experience, with the earliest account of a shipwreck, from ancient Egypt, being almost as old as the oldest known shipwreck.

The loss of the Gulf Livestock 1 fits the most popular image of a shipwreck, with a vessel being overpowered by the forces of nature in a storm at sea. Other conceptions involve ships being driven onto a rocky coast by stormy seas. Yet the best-known shipwreck, that of the Titanic in 1912, took place when the North Atlantic Ocean was almost calm; an iceberg was the cause, not stormy seas. There have been many types of shipwreck over the centuries, including ships that simply disappeared.

Even in the age of sail, when shipwrecks were much more common than they are today, most people had never been in a shipwreck or even seen one from the shore. Yet shipwrecks, like other types of disaster, were popular subjects for storytelling, and most people’s knowledge of disasters at sea came via such stories.

Shipwrecks feature in Homer’s Odyssey , written in the eighth century BCE, and St Paul’s shipwreck at Malta appears in the Bible, but shipwreck narratives as a literary genre only started in the sixteenth century CE when Portuguese survivors of shipwrecks produced pamphlets about their experiences, which found many readers. The non-fiction shipwreck narrative enjoyed its heyday from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, with Archibald Duncan’s six-volume anthology The Mariner’s Chronicle: Containing Narratives of the Most Remarkable Disasters at Sea (first volume 1804) being perhaps the greatest of them all. However, even in the late twentieth century stories such as Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm could achieve considerable popular success.

The dramatic nature of shipwrecks made them obvious targets for transformation into fictional literary forms. A number of William Shakespeare’s plays feature shipwrecks, most notably A Comedy of Errors (1594), Twelfth Night (1602) and The Tempest (1611). Shakespeare’s inspiration for the shipwreck in the last of these three is said to have been the story of the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609.

The Sea Venture was part of a supply fleet on its way to the struggling English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in North America. Encountering a storm while crossing the North Atlantic, the ship was wrecked on the island of Bermuda. The survivors managed to construct two smaller vessels from the shattered timbers of the Sea Venture and in 1610 they sailed on to Jamestown, only to find the colonists ready to evacuate the settlement. Fortunately, another supply fleet arrived and the colonists decided to continue with their new life in America. An account of the Sea Venture ’s wreck and subsequent events was published in London in 1611 and was probably known to Shakespeare when he wrote and presented The Tempest later that year.

After Shakespeare, the man who did most to bring the shipwreck into English literature was Daniel Defoe. Originally a London merchant, Defoe was swept up in the shipwreck-hunting mania that followed New Englander Captain Phips’s recovery of treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon in the Caribbean in 1687. Phips brought great wealth to himself and his backers in England. Many companies were set up to go on similar hunts for sunken treasure and Defoe invested in a diving-bell concerned with that aim, even becoming its treasurer. Like most such ventures this company achieved nothing; Defoe lost his money and was accused of financial irregularities.

This debacle was one of the reasons Defoe went bankrupt in 1692. To salvage his fortunes, he took up writing, producing both fiction and non-fiction. In 1703 a great storm swept across southern England and sank a dozen Royal Navy warships as well as forty merchant ships, with hundreds of sailors drowned. Defoe’s book The Storm (1704) was a detailed study of this disaster and was the first book to cover a national weather event.

Defoe’s fictional work Robinson Crusoe (1719) is regarded by many as the first English novel. It is a shipwreck—from which Crusoe is the only survivor—that begins the tale of his adventures as a castaway. The story of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk is usually taken to be the inspiration for Defoe’s work, and it is certainly true that the author’s account of Crusoe’s life on the island owes much to details of Selkirk’s time as a castaway. However, Selkirk was not shipwrecked.

After a dispute with the captain about the seaworthiness of his ship, Selkirk had asked to be put ashore on an island in the Juan Fernández group in the Pacific Ocean on South America in 1704. Only in 1709 was he rescued by a visiting British ship. Selkirk did at least have the satisfaction of learning that the ship he had left did later sink, and that only the captain and a few other men had survived. The fact that Selkirk was not shipwrecked has led some scholars to suggest the authors of various contemporary shipwreck narratives as possible alternative inspirations for Defoe’s castaway.

The success of Robinson Crusoe led to the popularity of shipwreck scenes in eighteenth-century literature. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gulliver survives a shipwreck and once he has reached the shore he falls asleep. On waking he discovers that he has been tied to the ground by the tiny inhabitants of the land of Lilliput. In Candide (1759), Voltaire has his hero survive a shipwreck near Lisbon, Portugal, only to reach that port just in time for the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which he also survives.

Neither Swift nor Voltaire had any personal experience of shipwreck, but one of the first notable poems about a shipwreck was written by a sailor who had survived not one but two of them and would eventually be lost in a third. The Scottish mariner William Falconer served on both merchant ships and warships, with his first shipwreck taking place in one of the latter. In 1760 the warship HMS-Ramillies was wrecked on the south coast of Devon. Out of 850 men on board, only 27 survived, one of whom was Falconer. Returning to the merchant service, Falconer joined a ship called Britannia , which was active in the Levant trade.

On a voyage from Alexandria to Venice, the ship was wrecked on the coast of Greece, with Falconer one of only three survivors. With this latter wreck as his main inspiration, Falconer wrote the poem The Shipwreck (1762), which enjoyed considerable acclaim. After finishing his equally popular maritime dictionary in 1769, Falconer set out for India as a passenger in the frigate HMS-Aurora . The ship left Cape Town, South Africa, on 27 December 1769 and was never seen again. It was generally thought to have been lost in a storm in the Indian Ocean in January 1770. Falconer’s poem remained an inspiration for both writers and artists well into the nineteenth century.

One of the most famous French novels of the eighteenth century was Paul et Virginie (1788), written by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. The titular young couple are brought up together on the island of Mauritius (then known as Ile de France) in the Indian Ocean and later fall in love. Eventually Virginie is forced to leave, and when she finally returns her ship is wrecked within sight of Mauritius, after which Paul finds her lifeless body washed up on the beach.

The author had spent some time in Mauritius and the inspiration for his shipwreck account is said to have been the loss of the French East Indiaman St Géran on the island in 1744, which only ten of the 267 people on board survived. The novel remained extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century and many artists portrayed the scene of Paul finding Virginie’s body on the beach.

Shipwrecks could impact more directly on the lives of writers, as in the case of the English poet William Wordsworth. His brother John was a captain in the service of the East India Company. In 1805 he set out on a voyage to India and China in his ship Earl of Abergavenny , but the voyage had hardly started when the ship was wrecked in a storm on the south coast of England. John Wordsworth was not among the survivors, and it has been claimed that grief over his brother’s death contributed to the declining quality of William Wordsworth’s later poems.

Family links to shipwreck are also found in the narrative poem Don Juan , which George Gordon, Lord Byron, began to publish in 1819. Byron’s grandfather, Admiral John Byron, had set out with Commodore Anson on his squadron’s voyage around the world in 1740 when he was a young midshipman. Unfortunately his ship, HMS-Wager , became separated after rounding Cape Horn and was wrecked on the coast of Chile. The shipwreck was followed by a mutiny among the surviving sailors, and young Byron was lucky to survive these events.

Eventually, in 1768, he published an account of his experiences that enjoyed some success with the reading public. Lord Byron used his grandfather’s account as inspiration for the shipwreck section of Don Juan , but the cannibalism in that section was drawn from other shipwreck narratives and not the story of the loss of the Wager .

Shipwrecks loom large in the works of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, especially his short story “Ms. Found in a Bottle” (1833) and his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837). In the latter, Poe thought so much of one of his inspirations, the loss of the American brig Polly in 1811, that he outlined much of its story in a footnote. One of the most famous American poems about a shipwreck, The Wreck of the Hesperus (1840) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had its inspiration in the great blizzard that swept across New England in January 1839, sinking twenty ships with a loss of forty lives.

In Longfellow’s poem, a captain unwisely brings his daughter along on a winter voyage. One of his crew says a big storm is coming, but the captain ignores him. Soon the ship is being hit by stormy seas and the captain ties his daughter to a mast to stop her being washed overboard. The ship is eventually wrecked on Norman’s Woe, a reef near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and all on board perish. The daughter is found still tied to the mast when it is washed ashore.

Longfellow’s direct inspiration was the Favorite , a vessel from Wiscasset, Maine, which was wrecked on Norman’s Woe in the 1839 storm. There were no survivors, and it was said that a woman’s body was found strapped to a mast. Longfellow changed the name of the vessel to the Hesperus , another vessel lost in the 1839 storm, which was wrecked near Boston. The poem was recited by generations of American schoolchildren, and it was still well enough known in the first half of the twentieth century to form the basis for two films, one made in 1927 and the other in 1’48.

Although it was greeted with widespread indifference when it first appeared in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is now regarded as one of the greatest American novels. Much of the inspiration for its contents came from the story of the loss of the whaleship Essex in 1820. The ship le( its home port of Nantucket, New England, and went to the Pacific Ocean in quest of whales.

When west of the coast of South America, the crew encountered a sperm whale that struck back at them, smashing a hole in the side of the Essex. Before the ship sank, the crew recovered some supplies from it, but they had only two small whaleboats to carry them across the ocean to South America. After many difficulties, and with some survivors resorting to cannibalism, only eight of the original crew of twenty were eventually picked up by passing ships. Many films have been made based on Moby-Dick , with the 1956 version being the most famous.

Although ships made of iron and, later, steel and propelled by steam engines seemed to promise greater safety at sea than the old wooden sailing ships, shipwrecks still occurred in the late nineteenth century. In December 1875 the German steamship Deutschland , bound for the U-A, was wrecked on a sandbank in the Thames estuary after straying on course. Among those who died in the wreck were five Franciscan nuns fleeing the anti-Catholic laws in Prussia.

Their fate moved a young English Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to write his famous poem The Wreck of the “Deutschland .” Wooden sailing ships remained vulnerable to shipwreck, and when the Royal Navy’s sail training ship HMS-Eurydice was lost on the Isle of Wight in 1878, with only two survivors from the 361 people on board, Hopkins produced the poem The Loss of the Eurydice . In both poems Hopkins struggles to understand God’s purpose in allowing such tragedies to occur, but finally comes to believe that acceptance of God’s higher wisdom is the only answer. None of Hopkins’s poems was published in his lifetime, but after their first printing in 1918 they were soon recognized as important literary works.

God’s purpose in allowing tragic shipwrecks to happen and His divine providence in allowing some people to survive them have been themes for writers since at least the sixteenth century. In the late nineteenth century the first writers of what would become science fiction saw shipwrecks in a different, more secular light. In his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869) Jules Verne created a character in Captain Nemo who is hostile to the world above the sea, with its political and religious conflicts, but even he needs money to support his activities.

Whenever Nemo needs to refill his coffers, he takes his submarine Nautilus to Vigo Bay in northwest Spain, where his divers collect gold, silver and jewels from the Spanish treasure galleons lost there in 1702. Those galleons, escorted by French warships, had arrived at Vigo to escape an Anglo-Dutch fleet that was looking for them. The pursuers then found their prey, sailed into Vigo Bay and destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet. Although most of the treasure had already been landed before the battle, tales of sunken riches at Vigo continued for decades afterwards.

H. G. Wells, in his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), placed a shipwreck survivor on an island who soon finds out that the resident doctor is conducting evil experiments there on animals and humans. Where once a shipwreck survivor might have been confronted by primitive tribes, he now finds himself at the mercy of a mad scientist.

Although shipwrecks by no means vanish from literature after 1900—indeed, one appears in a fiction work as recent as Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi (2001; film adaptation 2012)—they are no longer such important elements in stories as they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

__________________________________

Out of the Depths

Excerpted from Out of the Depths: A History of Shipwrecks by Alan G. Jamieson, available via Reaktion Books.

Alan G. Jamieson

Alan G. Jamieson

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poetry essay on shipwreck

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poetry essay on shipwreck

Diving into the Wreck Summary & Analysis by Adrienne Rich

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
  • Poetic Devices
  • Vocabulary & References
  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
  • Line-by-Line Explanations

poetry essay on shipwreck

"Diving into the Wreck" was written by the American poet Adrienne Rich and first published in a collection of the same name in 1973. The poem opens as the speaker prepares for a deep-sea dive and then follows the speaker's exploration of a shipwreck. Rich was a leading feminist poet, and many critical interpretations view the poem as an extended metaphor relating to the struggle for women's rights and liberation. That said, the poem is rich with symbolism related to a variety of subjects, and its reading doesn't need to be limited by Rich's biography. For example, it can also be taken as a more general exploration of personal identity and people's relationship to the past. To that end, before diving the speaker has "read the book of myths"—which perhaps represents the established ideas, norms, and stories about the wreck (and, metaphorically speaking, about the speaker and/or society at large)—and insists on instead gaining direct experience of the wreck by making the dive. The poem thus also becomes a kind of call for venturing into the perilous unknown in order to find the truth.

  • Read the full text of “Diving into the Wreck”

poetry essay on shipwreck

The Full Text of “Diving into the Wreck”

“diving into the wreck” summary, “diving into the wreck” themes.

Theme Women's Oppression and Erasure

Women's Oppression and Erasure

Lines 29-33.

  • Lines 37-43
  • Lines 52-70
  • Lines 71-94

Theme Exploration, Vulnerability, and Discovery

Exploration, Vulnerability, and Discovery

Lines 13-21.

  • Lines 22-33

Lines 44-51

Lines 52-60.

  • Lines 61-70
  • Lines 71-77

Lines 87-94

Theme Storytelling and Truths

Storytelling and Truths

  • Lines 72-73
  • Lines 78-82

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Diving into the Wreck”

First having read ... ... and awkward mask.

poetry essay on shipwreck

I am having ... ... but here alone.

There is a ... ... some sundry equipment.

Lines 22-28

I go down. ... ... I go down.

My flippers cripple ... ... will begin.

Lines 34-43

First the air ... ... the deep element.

And now: it ... ... differently down here.

I came to ... ... fish or weed

Lines 61-63

the thing I ... ... not the myth

Lines 64-70

the drowned face ... ... the tentative haunters.

Lines 71-76

This is the ... ... into the hold.

Lines 77-82

I am she: ... ... left to rot

Lines 83-86

we are the ... ... the fouled compass

We are, I ... ... do not appear.

“Diving into the Wreck” Symbols

Symbol The Wreck

  • Line 52: “I came to explore the wreck.”
  • Lines 55-56: “I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.”
  • Lines 57-60: “I stroke the beam of my lamp / slowly along the flank / of something more permanent / than fish or weed”
  • Lines 62-63: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”
  • Lines 74-76: “We circle silently / about the wreck / we dive into the hold.”
  • Lines 79-86: “whose breasts still bear the stress / whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies / obscurely inside barrels / half-wedged and left to rot / we are the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course / the water-eaten log / the fouled compass”
  • Line 90: “back to this scene”

Symbol The Drowned Face

The Drowned Face

  • Lines 64-65: “the drowned face always staring / toward the sun”
  • Line 78: “whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes”

Symbol The Book of Myths

The Book of Myths

  • Line 1: “First having read the book of myths”
  • Lines 53-54: “The words are purposes. / The words are maps.”
  • Lines 61-63: “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”
  • Lines 92-94: “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.”

“Diving into the Wreck” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

  • Line 5: “body,” “black”
  • Line 11: “sun,” “ schooner”
  • Line 16: “side,” “schooner”
  • Line 17: “We,” “what”
  • Line 18: “we”
  • Line 21: “some sundry”
  • Line 23: “Rung,” “rung”
  • Line 29: “cripple”
  • Line 30: “crawl”
  • Line 34: “blue”
  • Line 35: “bluer”
  • Line 36: “black,” “blacking”
  • Line 37: “my mask,” “powerful”
  • Line 38: “pumps,” “my,” “power”
  • Line 39: “sea,” “story”
  • Line 40: “sea,” “power”
  • Line 42: “to turn”
  • Line 49: “between”
  • Line 50: “besides”
  • Line 51: “ breathe,” “differently down”
  • Line 55: “damage,” “done”
  • Line 57: “stroke”
  • Line 58: “slowly”
  • Line 59: “something”
  • Line 64: “staring”
  • Line 65: “sun”
  • Line 67: “salt,” “sway”
  • Line 73: “ black,” “body”
  • Line 74: “circle silently”
  • Line 79: “breasts,” “still,” “bear,” “stress”
  • Line 80: “silver,” “copper,” “cargo”
  • Line 84: “course”
  • Line 86: “compass”
  • Line 88: “cowardice,” “courage”
  • Line 91: “carrying,” “camera”
  • Lines 9-11: “not like Cousteau with his / assiduous team / aboard the sun-flooded schooner”
  • Lines 13-18: “There is a ladder. / The ladder is always there / hanging innocently / close to the side of the schooner. / We know what it is for, / we who have used it.”
  • Line 3: “checked,” “edge”
  • Line 4: “on”
  • Line 5: “body,” “armor,” “rubber”
  • Line 6: “absurd flippers”
  • Line 7: “awkward”
  • Line 9: “his”
  • Line 10: “assiduous”
  • Line 11: “sun-flooded”
  • Line 29: “flippers cripple”
  • Line 37: “mask,” “powerful”
  • Line 38: “pumps,” “blood,” “power”
  • Line 39: “the sea,” “story”
  • Line 40: “the sea,” “power”
  • Line 49: “between,” “reefs”
  • Line 51: “breathe,” “differently”
  • Line 52: “explore”
  • Line 53: “words”
  • Line 54: “words”
  • Line 69: “curving,” “assertion”
  • Line 71: “This is”
  • Line 73: “armored body”
  • Line 74: “We,” “circle,” “silently”
  • Line 77: “she,” “he”
  • Line 78: “sleeps,” “eyes”
  • Line 79: “breasts,” “stress”
  • Line 80: “silver, copper, vermeil,” “lies”
  • Line 81: “inside”
  • Line 82: “wedged,” “left”
  • Line 85: “water,” “log”
  • Line 44: “now: it”
  • Line 72: “here, the”
  • Line 73: “black, the”
  • Line 77: “she: I”
  • Line 87: “are, I am, you”
  • Line 91: “knife, a”
  • Line 1: “book”
  • Line 2: “and loaded,” “camera”
  • Line 3: “checked,” “blade”
  • Line 5: “body-armor,” “black rubber”
  • Line 7: “grave,” “and,” “awkward mask”
  • Line 9: “like,” “Cousteau,” “his”
  • Line 10: “assiduous,” “team”
  • Line 11: “aboard,” “sun-flooded schooner”
  • Line 12: “alone”
  • Line 13: “ladder”
  • Line 14: “ladder,” “is always”
  • Line 15: “hanging innocently”
  • Line 16: “close,” “side,” “schooner”
  • Line 20: “piece,” “maritime,” “floss”
  • Line 24: “immerses me”
  • Line 25: “blue light”
  • Line 26: “clear,” “atoms”
  • Line 27: “human”
  • Line 30: “crawl,” “like,” “an insect,” “down,” “ladder”
  • Line 32: “when,” “ocean”
  • Line 33: “will,” “ begin”
  • Line 35: “bluer,” “and then green and then”
  • Line 39: “sea is,” “story”
  • Line 40: “sea is,” “question,” “power”
  • Line 41: “learn alone”
  • Line 48: “swaying,” “fans”
  • Line 51: “breathe,” “differently down”
  • Line 52: “explore,” “wreck”
  • Line 53: “words,” “purposes”
  • Line 54: “words,” “maps”
  • Line 57: “beam ,” “my lamp”
  • Line 58: “slowly ,” “along,” “flank”
  • Line 59: “something more permanent”
  • Line 61: “the thing”
  • Line 63: “the thing,” “the myth”
  • Line 64: “face always staring”
  • Line 66: “evidence”
  • Line 67: “salt,” “sway,” “this threadbare,” “beauty”
  • Line 68: “ribs,” “disaster”
  • Line 70: “among,” “tentative haunters”
  • Line 72: “mermaid”
  • Line 73: “streams black,” “merman,” “armored body”
  • Line 78: “face sleeps,” “open”
  • Line 79: “breasts still bear,” “stress”
  • Line 80: “silver,” “copper,” “vermeil,” “cargo,” “lies”
  • Line 81: “obscurely inside barrels”
  • Line 82: “half,” “left,” “rot”
  • Line 83: “half-destroyed instruments”
  • Line 84: “once,” “held,” “course”
  • Line 85: “water-eaten,” “log”
  • Line 86: “fouled,” “compass”
  • Line 89: “one,” “find”
  • Line 90: “this scene”
  • Line 92: “book”
  • Line 94: “names,” “not”
  • Lines 4-5: “on / the”
  • Lines 5-6: “rubber / the”
  • Lines 6-7: “flippers / the”
  • Lines 8-9: “this / not”
  • Lines 9-10: “his / assiduous”
  • Lines 10-11: “team / aboard”
  • Lines 11-12: “schooner / but”
  • Lines 14-15: “there / hanging”
  • Lines 15-16: “innocently / close”
  • Lines 19-20: “Otherwise / it”
  • Lines 20-21: “floss / some”
  • Lines 23-24: “still / the”
  • Lines 24-25: “me / the”
  • Lines 25-26: “ light / the”
  • Lines 26-27: “atoms / of”
  • Lines 30-31: “ladder / and”
  • Lines 31-32: “ one / to”
  • Lines 32-33: “ocean / will”
  • Lines 34-35: “then / it”
  • Lines 35-36: “then / black”
  • Lines 36-37: “yet / my”
  • Lines 37-38: “powerful / it”
  • Lines 38-39: “power / the”
  • Lines 39-40: “story / the”
  • Lines 40-41: “power / I”
  • Lines 41-42: “alone / to”
  • Lines 42-43: “force / in”
  • Lines 44-45: “forget / what”
  • Lines 45-46: “for / among”
  • Lines 46-47: “always / lived”
  • Lines 47-48: “here / swaying”
  • Lines 48-49: “fans / between”
  • Lines 49-50: “reefs / and”
  • Lines 50-51: “besides / you”
  • Lines 55-56: “done / and”
  • Lines 57-58: “lamp / slowly”
  • Lines 58-59: “flank / of”
  • Lines 59-60: “permanent / than”
  • Lines 60-61: “weed / the”
  • Lines 62-63: “wreck / the”
  • Lines 63-64: “myth / the”
  • Lines 64-65: “staring / toward”
  • Lines 65-66: “sun / the”
  • Lines 66-67: “damage / worn”
  • Lines 67-68: “beauty / the”
  • Lines 68-69: “disaster / curving”
  • Lines 69-70: “assertion / among”
  • Lines 72-73: “hair / streams”
  • Lines 74-75: “silently / about”
  • Lines 75-76: “wreck / we”
  • Lines 77-78: “he / whose”
  • Lines 78-79: “eyes / whose”
  • Lines 79-80: “stress / whose”
  • Lines 80-81: “lies / obscurely”
  • Lines 81-82: “ barrels / half-wedged”
  • Lines 82-83: “rot / we”
  • Lines 83-84: “instruments / that”
  • Lines 84-85: “course / the”
  • Lines 85-86: “log / the”
  • Lines 87-88: “are / by”
  • Lines 88-89: “courage / the”
  • Lines 89-90: “way / back”
  • Lines 90-91: “scene / carrying”
  • Lines 91-92: “camera / a”
  • Lines 92-93: “myths / in”
  • Lines 93-94: “which / our”

Extended Metaphor

  • Lines 1-3: “First having read the book of myths, / and loaded the camera, / and checked the edge of the knife-blade,”
  • Line 5: “the”
  • Line 6: “the”
  • Line 7: “the”
  • Line 11: “schooner”
  • Line 14: “ladder”
  • Line 16: “schooner”
  • Line 24: “the”
  • Line 25: “the”
  • Line 26: “the”
  • Line 30: “ladder”
  • Line 34: “blue,” “and then”
  • Line 35: “bluer and then green and then”
  • Line 38: “power”
  • Line 39: “the sea is”
  • Line 40: “the sea is,” “power”
  • Line 53: “The words are”
  • Line 54: “The words are”
  • Line 62: “the wreck,” “the wreck”
  • Line 63: “the thing”
  • Line 77: “I am she: I am he”
  • Line 78: “whose”
  • Line 79: “whose”
  • Line 80: “whose”
  • Line 82: “half-wedged”
  • Line 83: “half-destroyed”
  • Line 85: “the”
  • Line 86: “the”
  • Line 87: “We are, I am, you are”
  • Lines 91-92: “carrying a knife, a camera / a book of myths”
  • Line 30: “I crawl like an insect down the ladder”

“Diving into the Wreck” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

  • Maritime floss
  • Crenellated
  • Salt and sway
  • Mermaid/Merman
  • (Location in poem: Line 9: “Cousteau”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Diving into the Wreck”

Rhyme scheme, “diving into the wreck” speaker, “diving into the wreck” setting, literary and historical context of “diving into the wreck”, more “diving into the wreck” resources, external resources.

In the Poet's Own Voice — Adrienne Rich reads "Diving into the Wreck." 

Rich in the New Yorker — An insightful analysis of Rich's poetic work from the New Yorker.

Rich's Life and Work — A valuable resource from the Poetry Foundation.  

Plato and the Androgyne — An excerpt from Plato's discussion of the androgyne figure, which appears recurrently in Rich's poetry from around this time. 

Feminism and Poetry — A wonderful selection of poems organized by their relationship to the different stages of the feminist movement. 

LitCharts on Other Poems by Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Living in Sin

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

What Kind of Times Are These

Everything you need for every book you read.

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The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Series Two

By emily dickinson, life, poem 25: shipwreck.

  • Year Published: 1896
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States of America
  • Source: Dickenson, E. (1896). The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Series Two. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers.
  • Flesch–Kincaid Level: 6.6
  • Word Count: 60
  • Genre: Poetry
  • Keywords: 19th century literature, american literature, emily dickinson, poems, poetry, series 1
  • ✎ Cite This

Dickinson, E. (1896). Life, Poem 25: Shipwreck. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Series Two (Lit2Go Edition). Retrieved February 23, 2024, from https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/115/the-poems-of-emily-dickinson-series-two/3694/life-poem-25-shipwreck/

Dickinson, Emily. "Life, Poem 25: Shipwreck." The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Series Two . Lit2Go Edition. 1896. Web. https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/115/the-poems-of-emily-dickinson-series-two/3694/life-poem-25-shipwreck/ >. February 23, 2024.

Emily Dickinson, "Life, Poem 25: Shipwreck," The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Series Two , Lit2Go Edition, (1896), accessed February 23, 2024, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/115/the-poems-of-emily-dickinson-series-two/3694/life-poem-25-shipwreck/ .

It tossed and tossed, — A little brig I knew, — O'ertook by blast, It spun and spun, And groped delirious, for morn.

It slipped and slipped, As one that drunken stepped; Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight.

Ah, brig, good-night To crew and you; The ocean's heart too smooth, too blue, To break for you.

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By Emily Dickinson

It tossed and tossed, — A little brig I knew, — O’ertook by blast, It spun and spun, And groped delirious, for morn.

It slipped and slipped, As one that drunken stepped; Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight.

Ah, brig, good-night To crew and you; The ocean’s heart too smooth, too blue, To break for you.

This Poem Features In:

  • poems about ships

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Shipwrecks in Modern European Painting and Poetry: Radical Mobilisation of the Motif as Political Protest

Introduction

Cocooned in safety, we rehearse our peril and demise in the oceanic wilderness where a dramatic change in temperature and a switch of wind have turned benignly rocking nurture to tumultuous and deadly agitation. Shipwreck is also the synecdoche of all that shadows imperial expansion – navigational misadventure, piracy, cyclonic assault – tracking like sharks on the blood trail imperialism’s would-be glamorous advance.

Pitching puny humans against the formidable forces of nature, the shipwreck, or the genre of naufrage , as it’s preciously called, like a shiver-inducing gourmet delight, has been an ever-recurrent motif and narrative device in ‘western’ literature: from Homer’s Odysseus, Jonah of the Book of Prophets, Dante’s Ugolino, Shakespeare’s Prospero, through to our contemporary invocations of the catastrophic fate of boat people, demonised by so many governments across this planet in crisis. Shipwreck as extreme existential test has persisted through the centuries, but in visual art and writing the lineage intensifies to a perfect storm of staged maritime disasters as Neoclassicism segues into Romanticism and beyond. The theme of salvation through cunning or spiritual epiphany retreats and the political comes to the fore in works of protest or parody or both. Death might be the Leveller, as James Shirley wrote, but social hierarchies ensure that some are in a better position than others to postpone it.

Shipwreck as spectacle: Géricault and Turner

Before the advent of cinema, European painting took on the challenge, invoking the sublime terror of maritime disaster, but especially foregrounding the vicious brutality of the human response to it. J M W Turner raises such questions of the human predation behind Britain’s global empire with his close cropping of the wreck in ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the dead and dying – Typhoon coming on’, 1839’, inviting virtual engulfment of the viewer, where effects of sunset and carnage are bloodily indistinguishable and the twisted metal from the slaves’ shackles looks as actively rapacious as the swarming, maliciously toothy fish. Human fragments, even the tethered dark-skinned leg, towards the lower right of the painting, are less graphically resolved than the shackle as signifier of enslavement.

Depicting advanced disintegration, towards the disappearance point of the human, might allow for less affective investment by the viewer than the staged mortuary-to-come, with greyed and depleted but still well-modelled muscular flesh. This had been earlier and yet more famously the case with the young Théodore Gericault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa depicting the aftermath of the wreck of the French Senegal-bound frigate the Medusa, that in 1816, through the arrogance and poor navigation skills of the captain and his lieutenant advisers, ran aground off the coast of present day Mauritania. The painting attracted in equal measure condemnation and adulation in the French Academy and rocked a wider public, not only by featuring a young African man at the apex of the dominant right-hand triangle in his composition, but also through reports of Géricault’s collecting for preliminary studies severed limbs from the morgue of the Beaujon Hospital. He’d set up his studio opposite the Beaujon where he did dozens of sketches of dying patients and interviewed two Medusa survivors, including its surgeon, to insure he caught the sensation of death by dehydration, starvation and the stench, under a broiling sun, of the slow putrescence of excoriated limbs. But the account of the aftermath of the wreck by co-rafters Savigny and Corréard was perhaps to become the painter’s greatest resource, as it no doubt was for Lord Bryon in depicting Don Juan’s shipwreck in Canto II of the long eponymous poem which also appeared in 1819.

Recruiting for a contemporary moment the genre of ‘historical tableau’, Géricault’s painting was a frontal assault on the regime of Louis XVIII where nepotism had awarded the captaincy of the ship to the inept and unqualified protégé Captain Chaumareys, who arrogated for himself, the Governor appointed to the colony of Senegal, and most of the higher ranking officers, places in the various improvised life boats, decked and undecked, while, assigned to a huge, hastily cobbled raft to be towed behind this ragged fleet, were one hundred and fifty others , for the most mere sailors and soldiers. According to Corréart and Savigny’s amiable phrasing, the garrison was composed of ‘the scum of all countries, the refuse of prisons, where they’d been collected to make up the force charged with the defence and protection of the colony (Corréart & Savigny1816, p.150)’.

Géricault’s huge oil painting (491 cm X 716 cm) is no mere invitation to the vicarious savouring of sublime peril. According to the account by these relatively ‘noble’ bourgeois survivors Alexandre Corréart, engineer and geographer, and surgeon Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny (1816), having been cut adrift, lest they slow the advance of their compatriots in the boats, the one hundred and fifty initially aboard the raft were whittled down over thirteen days of drifting to a mere fifteen. Many were murdered, or heavily wounded and thrown overboard in repeated mutinous uprisings instigated by enraged, wine-soaked, dehydrated hunger-crazed, sabre-wielding ‘monsters’ and ‘scum’. Not without cause, the mutineers blamed the officers for their abandonment, but unjustly targeted those decent enough to come on the raft. Many threw themselves into the sea, all having lost powers of rational thought through the trauma of abandonment and physical torture, but this collective ‘ departure of reason ’ was especially catalysed by the horror of bearing testimony to such quick descent into depravity. After ten days, the seriously weak and dying were, with ‘regretful’ pragmatism, pushed off into the waters where fins of marauding sharks were clearly visible above the surface – this to economise on the ever-diminishing supplies of wine, the only source of sustenance left on board. But what shocked the authors themselves, who ended up participating in this degraded and decidedly unsymbolic mass, was that once it was mixed with that of flying fish roasted with the last remnants of gunpowder, human flesh washed down with various grades of urine became the survivors’ plat du jour .

Géricault denies direct representation to those responsible and portrays their moral legacy by honing in on the wretched drifting dying and dead, all turning with the last of their energy towards the spectre of their ultimate rescue, the Argus, for the moment a mere jaundiced speck, retreating on the horizon. This is death’s democracy but also a savage critique of the retreat in France from republicanism: by giving apical prominence to the African, who clearly has more vigour left than his co-rafters, Géricault radically inverts the hierarchical social order, reimposed after Napoleon’s demise with Louis XVIII, rendering the bankruptcy of such pyramidal ranking – from supreme sovereign to the toiling slave, as celebrated in neo-classical art.

The intensity with which this Medusa disaster had been reported, the wide readership of Corréart and Savigny’s narrative and the painting’s own gathering notoriety – it was exhibited in London shortly after the Parisian showing – not only established Géricault’s reputation, if not his fortune, but with its huge impact on other young painters like Delacroix, heralded the advent of Romanticism in art.

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By Patrick Carpen: The Greatest Writer On Earth

It tossed and tossed, — A little brig I knew, — O’ertook by blast, It spun and spun, And groped delirious, for morn.

It slipped and slipped, As one that drunken stepped; Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight.

Ah, brig, good-night To crew and you; The ocean’s heart too smooth, too blue, To break for you.

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poetry essay on shipwreck

“The Shipwreck” by Emily Dickinson – 2023 Prescribed NSC Poetry

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Explore the depths of Emily Dickinson’s “The Shipwreck” with this comprehensive digital poetry pack. Perfect for students of all levels studying English Literature, this pack includes a detailed PowerPoint presentation with comprehensive analysis, a blank student copy of the poem, an annotated version, worksheets on the author and themes, and a TP-CASTT analysis activity. Additionally, we have included suggested post-reading activities and a suggested essay topic to help you engage with the poem and its meaning. The PowerPoint presentation provides a visual and engaging way to explore the poem’s themes, imagery, and structure. The annotated version of the poem includes additional insights and analysis to help students understand the poem’s meaning and message. The worksheets and activities are designed to help students develop critical thinking, analysis, and literary interpretation skills. The suggested essay topic will help students practice their writing and research skills.   Whether you’re a student, teacher, or homeschooling parent, this digital poetry pack on “The Shipwreck” by Emily Dickinson is the perfect resource to help you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of this powerful and evocative poem. With a range of materials to suit all learning styles, this pack will help you to unlock the rich meanings and imagery of this classic poem.

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poetry essay on shipwreck

"The Shipwreck" by Emily Dickinson Poetry Pack

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poetry essay on shipwreck

Description

Explore the depths of Emily Dickinson's "The Shipwreck" with this comprehensive digital poetry pack. Perfect for students of all levels studying English Literature, this pack includes a detailed PowerPoint presentation with comprehensive analysis, a blank student copy of the poem, an annotated version, worksheets on the author and themes, and a TP-CASTT analysis activity. Additionally, we have included suggested post-reading activities and a suggested essay topic to help you engage with the poem and its meaning.

The PowerPoint presentation provides a visual and engaging way to explore the poem's themes, imagery, and structure. The annotated version of the poem includes additional insights and analysis to help students understand the poem's meaning and message. The worksheets and activities are designed to help students develop critical thinking, analysis, and literary interpretation skills. The suggested essay topic will help students practice their writing and research skills.

Whether you're a student, teacher, or homeschooling parent, this digital poetry pack on "The Shipwreck" by Emily Dickinson is the perfect resource to help you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of this powerful and evocative poem. With a range of materials to suit all learning styles, this pack will help you to unlock the rich meanings and imagery of this classic poem.

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poetry essay on shipwreck

Poems by Emily Dickinson: Shipwreck

poetry essay on shipwreck

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  • Feature of Character

emily dickinson's poetry

Updated 23 November 2022

Subject Feature of Character ,  Illness ,  Writers

Downloads 63

Category Health ,  Literature

Topic Curiosity ,  Death ,  Emily Dickinson

Because of her uncontrollable fascination with mortality, Emily Dickinson has been dubbed the "Epic of Curiosity" by a number of academics. Dickinson became known as the "poet of shadow" as a result of this preoccupation. She investigates death from every perspective imaginable – as the chivalrous lover, the outrageous hit guy, the bodily corruptor, or the free agent. The poet was reportedly fascinated with the subject of death and life after death. It is heinous that she expressed death in all of her everyday activities. Although death has been the topic for scrutiny for several literary artists and philosophers for a long period of time, Dickinson prudently stigmatized himself from others by expressing it in a rather special way. Consequently, she explored death as a captivating, fantastic and puzzling occurrence rather than highlighting it in ancient mundane appearance. Furthermore, she expressed the theme of death to the degree that it occupied a quarter of her poetry. Emily Dickinson’s poetry work comprises diverse descriptions of death that entail emotional feedback to the human bodies’ into perpetuity, insaneness or nothingness. Her poems’ authority has its roots from the elegant utilization of literary devices and techniques to give symbolism to demise and obscurity of meaning that enables diverse perspectives of these journeys. Although, these ideas highlighted by Dickinson may appear conflicting at times, they all stress her notion that there are numerous forms of demise. Death is the fundamental and melancholic concern of Emily Dickinson’s poetry work.The paper will shed light on the point of views of the theme of death in the poetry of Emily Dickson. Background Dickinson Homestead highlights the place where the poet spent majority of her life. It would be impossible to narrate that the famous American poet spent a staggering fifteen years on Pleasant Street. While around this street, she occasionally watched funeral parades passing via her home and proceeding to the cemetery. Undeniably, she was reminded of death often and thus may have commenced thinking on her own demise and what may arrive after it. Dickinson & Press (2006) presume that this sense of doom eventually stirred her crave in writing poems of the themes of death. Typically, Dickinson live a certain form of life in an era where medical science was less explored and that people died from non-sophisticated signs and symptoms of the illness(Dickinson & Press, 2006). Hence, she was severally confronted with the sequence of human survival, from birth to demise and demise again. Dickinson attempted to capture this tragedy of human life via her poetry. Wang (2015) narrates that Emily Dickinson experienced numerous tragic deaths of her close colleagues which typically subjected her to live an antisocial and melancholic life. Prior to writing poems, Emily lost some of her close parents and schoolmates such as Samuel Bowles, Rev. Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord, and Josiah Holland(Wang, 2015). Moreover, she lost her lovely nephew Gilbert that triggered an emotional suffering in her life. She revealed in a letter that the consistent deaths were too much to bear such as The Civil War. The latter claimed the lives from a number of great young persons and this backed up the Emily’s thoughts on the theme of death. Writing poetry based on the subject of death was therefore her strategy to tolerate the loss of her beloved persons and dilemma between the belief in eternal life and the physical interpretations for death and what occurs after it. Body According to Khaangku (2011), "I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain " highlights a differing interpretation of the theme of death by Emily Dickinson in her poetry work. Nonetheless, the poem implies an internal death at the expense of a physical one. The audience can interpret that in the poetry work, Dickinson is conversing about her own demise. Although this process is defined as an actual funeral, all the events are similar to what appears her emotional deathKhaangku (2011). Earlier, her mind grows to be a dazed one and she hears irrelevant sounds till a bell began to toll. Then, a feeling of loneliness and silence surrounds her. Lastly, she imagines as if she were in a boat that entails the breakdown of a plank and she falls down and smashes the universe. As expounded, this poem sheds light on Dickinson’s belief that a person can die on numerous occasions and that the actual death is not the solitary form of death, nor the worst. Whitcomb (2016) offers an overview of the theme of death in Dickinson poems. Nevertheless, the consistent allusion to repetitive sounds that torment the poet assist to stress the emotional suffering, anguish and the troubling hyperesthesia that she is exposed to(Whitcomb, 2016). Among these are the walking of the grievers with lead boots and the consistent beat of the drum and ringing of the bell. Furthermore, silence is alive and escorting her in her wreck and sorrow: a symbol that emphasizes her emotional feeling of cessation with the universe. Wang (2015) argues that the image of a shipwreck is utilized to analyze argument to a beam of wood that breaks as a result of extreme pain. Nonetheless, the image occurs when the author falls continually from space and upon she falls, she smashes the planet. In addition, the psychic outbreak appears to be infinite, though the audience can interpret that she comprehended what the description of death via her personal experience (Wang, 2015). Emily Dickinson wrote a simulated nonfiction sketch of death, “Dust is the only secret; highlighting that demise was the only one who existed in anonymity. Dickinson& Press (2006) evaluates that this Poem examples majority of her verses that typifies many of her verses that humanize death of which “Because I could not stop for Death’ is the best. She meticulously scrutinized the atmospheres of the perishing persons, the feedback of the observers, the dreadful fight of the body for life, alterations in a household after demise, the positioning of the body for the funeral(Dickinson& Press, 2006). Death typically viewed dingy and abysmal, astoundingly categorized as ‘kindly’, ‘slowly drove’, and ‘Knew no haste’ intensify sympathy of death. Imagery in the poetry work highlights a unique comprehension of life before and life after demise. Hence, they combine in unison epitome of death. A conflicting vision of the theme of death occurs in Dickinson’s poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death --." Death is conveyed as a journey headed for eternity in this poem. Additionally, this poem implies a vision of an eternal life where the person surpasses and proceeds to a space time appears non-existent. Obviously, this is the poet’s romantic perspective of death. The poet personalizes death as a person who is patient, civil and obedient and who offers rides to persons. Wang (2015) narrates that after death halts for a hectic poet who had no ample time to give a second thought on the subject on death, they begin a voyage together in the direction of eternity, passing via places that epitomize diverse phases of life. In additionally, ambiguity plays a critical role in this poem(Wang, 2015). For instance, the emotional allusion to the school could be comprehended as if the author and Death were passing by the school to fetch a child who had previously perished and when the author advocates, "We passed the setting sun," the setting sun could elucidate that that the poet hopped old age. Lambert (2013) argues that the cemetery was the final destination for this voyage, where the dead person is deserted. Lastly, the poet and death outdo and proceed to eternity; a situation in which time is unnoticeable and we can concludes that there is an atmosphere of harmony(Lambert, 2013) Poetic devices and techniques are utilized to show imaginations in the audience’s mind and support this interpretation of death. Khaangku (2011) contend that the portraying of the death is a convincing one and backs up the concept that it is a temporary one. By paralleling it to a house, it offers a comfort that does not form nausea to a place that otherwise can possess a negative suggestion(Khaangku, 2011). The depiction of the coldness felt prior to leaving the corpse is an authoritative one and stresses the coldness of the human body after demise. Lastly, the contingency of time and the explanation of a harmonious destination offers the reader with a feeling of anticipation to reach that venue. Wang (2015) says that the horses in the final stanza symbolize numerous things. For example, horses epitomize a simile of the soul. Moreover, horses symbolize travel which conforms to the message of the poem. As illuminated, the choice of the phrases is very elaborate and the rhyme assist to stress words that contain a significant meaning in the poem (Wang, 2015). "I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died" highlights a vision of death that entails that there is no eternal life as it concentrates on the decay that happens after the demise of the author herself, a process that results to absolutely nothing. I heard a Fly buzz - when I died The Stillness in the Room- Was like the Stillness in the Air- Between the Heaves of Storm Reliant on the interpretation, the tone could be viewed as a paralytic fear or serenity. Surrounding the dead body implies that there is complete quietness since persons have stopped to cry and the wind halted blowing immensely. Lambert (2013) assess that the earth appears to be expected since the author had made a declaration before ceasing to be: I willed my Keepsakes…” The fly that comes closer to the decayed body demonstrates the animals that will carry on the cycle of the human life while consuming from the body(Lambert, 2013). Lastly, at the final phase of the poem, the windows of the soul, which could be explained as the eyes, flop and the soul dies. In addition, there seems to be a period between the prompt of the actual demise itself and the physical journey to emptiness. Accordingly, in the initial verse of the poem, the poet had previously perished. Though, the windows flopped till the final line of the poem. The instant appears to be of ambiguity as the poet had lost mindfulness of her environment though her awareness is reducing. Whitcomb (2016) addresses that although death can be deduced as a negative occasion, the poem puzzlingly designates death as a usual occurrence that results to the progress of life in other natures. The literary devices and techniques assist to stress the theme of death. In addition, there is a consistent emphasis of the fly. Here, this choice of words results to the ambiguity of the description(Whitcomb, 2016). The imagery negligibly restores the meaning. Moreover, the utilization of the term ‘blue’ can be understood as not only sorrowful but also fear and panic. Nevertheless, there is evidences of ambiguity in other lines of the poem. Wang (2015) contend that the audience can infer when the poet halts hearing noises and feeling the wind. Here, it is not because they have stooped but also they have been brainwashed in the perspectives. Lastly, the rhyme and rhythm stress phrases at the end of the lines that include ‘fly’ and view which are keywords in comprehending the meaning(Wang, 2015). According to Khaangku (2011), “On this wondrous sea” typifies a more appealing image of eternity than the one realized in the conscious sleeping a grave found in “Because I could not stop for Death.” Afterlife can be realized on a distant shore past the wondrous sea and storms, and its soundless venue of relaxation and stability, where the commentators are swift(Khaangku, 2011). In addition, there is a pilot who can provide insight and guidance on the wanderer of the seas to the last shore, “at last!” Dickinson & Press (2006) says those two phrases confidently propose that afterlife is a place where a person might long to go and feel liberation and even delight at arriving there. This afterlife is alluring and a form of heaven even if angels and God are not listed(Dickinson & Press, 2006). Perhaps, “On this wondrous sea” illuminates the attitude towards death as seen in the poems assessed. Demise is explored at the absence of the concepts outlined in the whole paper to attempt to evaluate their larger significance. Wang (2015) narrates that theearth and eternity are things known, a grave that is a house, a lively perception, a shore to which we come “at last” eternally stormy and “wondrous.” (Wang, 2015). Conclusion As explicated above, Emily Dickinson is a completely perfect American poet that crafts her poems to expresses her deepest thoughts on the behalf of pretext of numerous themes. Though her main fascination was with demise, which she focused extremely with great vision in unearthing the unknown of death. She regularly fit herself in the shoes of the person who was dying in an effort to address what it may sound to actually live. Her perfectly crafted poems portraying the theme of death stresses the diverse elements of compounding pain and power of the involvement along with the correspondingly sense of gain. Arguably, most of her poetry work has been centered on the theme of death. Surprisingly, she sees deaths in different point of views than the other poets. In her perspectives, death is not an occurrence for the death rather demise is beautiful, fanciful and preternatural. As expounded by the author, death is unavoidable among human beings from the period we arrive on this mauling planet of life referred as the ‘earth.’ Examination of the theme of death offered a panoramic point of views that include but not limited to God and Immorality. The characteristics of death highlighted in this poetry work are very conflicting and complexities of life. Dickinson applied these images so as to define death in an attempt to describe it. Additionally, she offers human and non-humancharacteristics a portion of her remorseless expedition to comprehend it. In her death poems, she did provide her verdict of death since death for her remains the great unearthed mystery. References Dickinson, E., & Press, P. (2006). I heard a fly buzz when I died. Petra Press. Khaangku, P. (2011). The Images of Death in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Srinakharinwirot University, p14-34. Lambert, E. L. (2013). Emily Dickinson's Joke about Death. Studies in American Humor, (27), 7-32. Wang, J. (2015). Pain and its Variants in Dickinson’s Poetry in 1862-1865. Whitcomb, M. (2016). Escape from Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s Life of Freedom.

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    It spun and spun, And groped delirious, for morn. It slipped and slipped, As one that drunken stepped; Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight. Ah, brig, good-night. To crew and you; The ocean's heart too smooth, too blue,

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