Bo Lo
Victoria Barreras
Marvin Lee
Emily Dickinson #712, pg 487-488
During the nonexistence from the human world, you’re left to travel with Death for eternity while revisiting the places that you’ve been throughout your life for the last time. In the poem 712, Emily Dickinson wishes for relaxation after everything is finally over, death allows us to have a peaceful and settled mind. New laws are followed in the different world, in which the writer states, “We slowly drove – He knew no haste and I had put away my labor and my leisure too, for his civility.” In our current society, speed is what we crave and process on. Here in the city, we are always rushing to get from place to place. Our minds are so unsettled as we are constantly processing new thoughts and experiences. Contrarily, by following Death, everything slows down and is taken down a notch. Our lives tend to slow down when death affects us in anyway. When we are faced with death, we often have to forget and give up on things such as “labor” and “leisure”. We do not think about things like life and work when we are close to the end, we don’t worry about the events that have happened to us in the past. During an encounter with death, Emily was only worried about the moments she was about to experience. This poem can be applied to our day-to-day life as we are usually preoccupied with things that seem irrelevant at the moment of death. It is at that moment where our need for haste comes to an end.
4 responses so far ↓
al158379 // Oct 24th 2015 at 4:48 am
I agree with your interpretation. I think that the idea that death is inevitable and that it might be coming sooner rather than later and the acceptance of this is what allows us to appreciate the little things in life. We lead a very fast paced life especially here in NYC that we tend to forget to stop and smell the roses every once in a while in our haste to live our lives to the fullest extent possible, we are missing the small events that are also important.
mi141990 // Oct 24th 2015 at 11:45 am
I totally agree with your response to the poem. In our day to day life some people don’t really care much about the important things in life. They get distracted and decide to focus on the unnecessary things. They start caring about the important things in life when they are facing a tragedy. People should focus more on the important things in life everyday instead of doing that during a tragedy.
NATALIA MALAVER // Oct 24th 2015 at 11:59 am
Agreed, I feel like we always take on so many things, or maybe none at all, but we make ourselves feel busy. Thus, stressing ourselves out with that ending? Stress. It’s interesting to read about someone from back then feel this way about the everyday life, because before so much technology maybe there was more appreaciation to your surroundings, but I guess not
JMERLE // Oct 24th 2015 at 12:58 pm
Victoria, Bo, Marvin,
This is basically a nicely done paragraph! I just have a few suggestions. You state your topic immediately—great! You get to your quote nicely, and you begin well here. The last few sentences, though, are rather general, beginning with “We do not think about things . . . ” until the end of the paragraph. Remember to stay close to your quotation, and avoid the tendency to start discussing it generally. Remember, too, if you don’t feel like you have enough specific things to say about your quote, to choose another quote.
Grade: 9/10