Notes

Emily Dickinson
Death

Immortality, civility, eternity
Slant rhyme

First stanza
Death-, ourselves-

Second stanza
He knew no haste
My labor and my leisure too
Away, civility

Third stanza
We passed the ×3
School, children
Recess, Ring
Gazing grain, setting sun

Fourth stanza
Gossamer, Gown
Tippet, Tulle
Chill, Tulle

Fifth stanza
Ground, ground

Sixth stanza
Horse's Heads
Day, Eternity

Key words
Death, immortality, eternity, civility, we

Are black and white opposite?

Emily Dickinson – Death

“Poets often withhold certitude, which can at the same time empower readers to think creatively.”

My favorite part of literature is poetry. It is because I hate reading and it takes extremely long time for me to read novel. However, since I am a musician, I love to read lyrics of songs. As a singer, I think delivery of the lyrics is one of the most important part of performing. To deliver it properly, singers need to put a lot of time and effort to understand the lyrics. It might be impossible to fully understand the message of author. But, readers can receive the literature and understand it in their own way.

Firstly, death is the biggest theme of this poem. Emily Dickinson mentioned a lot about characteristic of death. Personification of death encourages readers to think about characteristic of death which most of people usually don't think about too much. Ironically, the other biggest theme in the poem is life which is usually considered as an opposite idea of death. By combining the characteristics of those two opposite ideas, it encourages readers to think about the idea which is important but is avoided by people to be thought about.

There are a lot of poems and lyrics that often withhold certitude. It is because human can never understand others' thought perfectly. So, the smart poets know the fact and try to write their ideas that they want to speak out to the world in the most effective way. In my opinion, that is why readers feel like poets often withhold certitude. Also, themes of poems always exist in somewhere in every individual's life. People just forget about things that are not related to them at the moment or are not considered as important part. And those small ideas that authors mention stick into readers brain and makes it to work in different way, which causes the thing called creativity.

Too well described...

Last Wednesday our English class had a sweet trip to New York Broad Way. Since, it was the first time that I visited Manhattan after I came to this school, and my girl friend was also accompanying, I was extremely excited. The show that we watched was "Curious incident of the dog in the night time". The play was basically about a boy who has an autism. The boy tries to find the person who killed a dog, which leads him to find his mom who left him when he was young. In the first half, most of the story happens in the boy's home town but the second half was about the boy's journey to find his mom which lives in London.

 The biggest thing that caught my attention was staging. They used a lot of weird sound effects such as siren sounds and electronic sounds. Purpose of the sound effects was to describe the characteristic of autistic individual. People who are affected by autism has great ability of visualization, but also has poor hearing ability. The sound effects that they used perfectly expressed how autistic feel when they hear things. Also, the lightening was very captivative and splendid. It made me to be speechless. The other thing that I was so interested was the cool props. The whole floor was built up by the tiles which could be opened, closed, and go down.

 This show changed my opinions of  autism or those people whose actions are weird. I used to keep away from those people, as if they could hurt me. But the show described the life of autist so well. The sound effect, lightening, blocking, choreography, acting, and the way how author told the story strongly encouraged me to focus on the play and helped me to understand the mystery of the human brain. Although the show had lots of interesting and funny elements, topic was still heavy.

I suppose that the show affected the audiences in all different ways. For me, before I got into the theater, I was just glad about watching a Broad Way play with Charlotte which is huge fan of Theatre. During the show, however, there were a lot of scenes that reminded some of my personal memories which made me extremely nervous and uncomfortable in the theater. Fortunately, she recognized that I was having hard time just sitting there down and watching it. I sincerely appreciated that she hold my cold hands and helped me to release my tension. After the show, I was exhausted and surprised because of the too well described play. I would say this play is a awesome show, but I won't recommend it to people who already know and understand about an autism. You will feel extreme pain in either your brain or heart for 2 hours and 45 minutes.