Emily Dickinson is not like many other poets, she possesses individual expertise, but she does share a common characteristic with other writers. Dickinson perpetually wrote about the things that fascinated her or intrigued her. I would say that Dickinson’s work is universal, but I feel like most of her work is dark, in an almost death-like/immortality; this is a very common theme for her. For example, Dickinson wrote an interesting couplet that is very well-known to others for its beautiful words that flow so well. There is so much meaning within two simple sentences that when you think about it, you actually have to read it a few times to interpret it. The couplet was written during 1868 and followed her typical theme of death/immortality:
Soft as the massacre of Suns
By Evening’s Sabres slain.
One will notice that she uses no type of punctuation expect an apostrophe. The alliterated sound of an “Ss” is so complex that you can almost hear its repetition when reading it to yourself. I think this couplet has a much deeper meaning then what is felt upon first reading it. For example, Soft as the massacre of Suns, when you think about a massacre, it is never something that is thought to be soft, it’s rather something brutal and harsh. So why would Dickinson couple two words with very opposite meanings?
My interpretation of Dickinson’s couplet is that when it is night, the beauty of the day is no longer there, but the evening is still just as beautiful. Just like when we flood our life with all the greatness in the world, even death shall be beautiful. Another thing that I interpreted from the beginning of the couplet, Soft as the massacre of the Suns depicts an undeniable death. For example, as night comes the sun, has to go away and when it does it leaves a beautiful scenic view for us to see even as it is dying, it leaves a soft kind of feeling. Then at night, although it’s slain, it protects the sky and by morning the sun rises again.
I wrote a couplet that I believe explains what Dickinson meant by her short but meaningful couplet:
Tiny as a flood of tears
By Demise Being tattered.
Through this couplet, I am trying to portray that our life is so small, when compared to all the other beings that have lived and with death the beauty of life is taken away from them/us. However, the beauty is in the fact that if you live a good and reasonable life, even after death, the tattered pieces shall remain. Death is undeniable, but it doesn’t have to awful. If you lived a fulfilling life, even death can be beautiful. Just like the sun is slain so also is our life but the memories still remain.
I appreciate the combo of close reading and creative response here. The explanation still seems bit confusing to me–perhaps because you shift from Dickinson’s concrete description of nature (the shadowed rays of evening slaying the sky red at sunset) to which she ascribes a kind of beautiful violence, to a description of the human element of tears in a more abstract sense (“demise” does the slaying here). In that way, I didn’t completely get the way in which your poem maps on to Dickinson, but it is clear that you replicated the sounds quite nicely, and that the act of imitation itself forced you to engage the poem from a different perspective, helping you realize new things about it.