Dickinson Paper
[This is an analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”. There are six parts to the paper: The initial response, where I write down our first thoughts on the poem; the paraphrase, where I summarize the poem in sentence form; the report, where I analyze the poem in detail; the parody, where I wrote my own poem in a similar style to Dickinson’s poem; the interview, where I asked my mother to read the poem and give her opinion on it; and the author’s afterword, where I reflect on the process of writing this paper.]
The Heart Asks Pleasure First
The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.
– Emily Dickinson
Part I: Initial Response
I feel like this poem is describing different stages in life. People begin life just wanting to be happy, but as they grow older, their hope to find pleasure is deadened by the pain of experience. Eventually, some people become so depressed that they give up and die. I think this is a very pessimistic outlook on life, but for some reason I could relate strongly to this poem. Dickinson has a way of bringing out our deepest emotions and articulating them in simple yet eloquent words. The reason that this poem speaks to me on such a deep level is that I have experienced exactly what she is talking about, although on a much lesser scale.
Dickinson’s word choice in this poem is interesting. I still don’t understand why she used the word “inquisitor” in the second to last line. I don’t know what the heart’s inquisitor would be. I think that she might be talking about a person who asks too much of someone’s heart and ends up abusing it. My first thought was that she is speaking about a lover who has forsaken her, but I think that this poem could apply to any form of love or heartache. For example, when I first read this poem it reminded me of the pain that I felt with the death of my grandfather a few years ago. I think her main idea is that suffering makes you want to give up life in order to escape from it. This point can be applied to any kind of emotional pain, not just heartache because of a lover’s cruelty. The reason that Emily Dickinson’s poems are so universal is that they talk about a specific event or problem in her life but in general terms. They are extremely relatable.
Part II: Paraphrase
The heart first just wants to be happy. Then, as time goes on, it begins to feel pain so it lowers its expectations to just stopping that pain. It finds things that temporarily stop the suffering. Then, it finds sleep, where it can forget the pain. Then, finally, if the suffering persists and life asks too much of the heart, it will die to escape pain.
Part III: Report
Emily Dickinson’s view on love and heartache is expressed in the poem The Heart Asks Pleasure First. This poem is a good example of how wonderfully Dickinson can speak to the average person through her writing. When I first read this poem, it touched me in many ways. It reminded me of how I felt after my grandfather’s death three years ago, which was a difficult event for me to cope with. Although Dickinson may be talking about a lover in this poem, the feelings mentioned in it relate to many different kinds of love, whether it be for a lover, friend, or family member.
In this poem, Dickinson expresses a relatively pessimistic view on life and suffering. The poem begins with the line, “The heart asks pleasure first,” then goes on to list things that the heart wants in different stages of its life. Dickinson never married and this poem might be expressing her sentiments that influenced this decision, or talking about an experience that brought her to never want a deep, intimate relationship with someone. Her saying that the heart then wants “excuse from pain” suggests that something happens to the heart where it gives up hope for pleasure and simply wants to stop suffering.
Dickinson chooses her words carefully. They consequently have a greater meaning that speaks more forcefully to the reader. In the third line, “And then, those little anodynes,” it seems strange to me that she would use such an uncommon word as “anodyne”. I had to look up the definition in the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary and the editors defined anodyne as an adjective as, “serving to assuage pain; soothing.” She could have used several other words, but they wouldn’t have had the same effect. She was clearly trying to convey a very specific idea, although I’m still not sure what that was. She could have been referring to drug use in this line, but I think she was also speaking about finding a distraction away from pain.
The use of language is very interesting in this poem. Dickinson has a knack for using unusual words that seem out of place and completely change the meaning of a sentence. When she says, “And then, if it should be / The will of its Inquisitor, / The liberty to die,” I was completely taken aback by how strange yet meaningful this sentence is. I wasn’t sure what she meant by the heart’s “Inquisitor.” The word sounds out of place. At first, I thought that she might be talking about the person whose heart is in pain. I went back again to the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary to look up the definition of “inquisitor” and found out that it means “one who inquires or makes inquisition, especially a questioner who is excessively rigorous or harsh.” After looking at this definition, I thought that maybe she was referring to a lover who had broken her heart. When I reread the poem with this definition in mind, it didn’t make sense. I reconsidered what could be powerful enough to control whether the heart lives or dies. The heart’s inquisitor could be either God, or life itself. Then I thought back to my original idea that the inquisitor was the person in pain, and this seemed to make sense. If a person is in anguish, he or she might question whether his or her heart can continue to cope with the situation, or should just give up and die. Sometimes people are so miserable that they wish they could die.
I found it interesting that Dickinson described life as a “liberty.” Is it truly a liberty to die? This is yet another example of how she puts a negative slant on life. The heart is imprisoned by pain, and can only be freed from it once the heart has died. When I thought more about what she said, it didn’t seem as strange to me that death would be a liberty. If you are truly in unbearable physical or emotional pain, you might think of death as a kind of liberation. By calling death a liberty, Dickinson is pointing out that life is pain and the only absolute way to be free of it is through death.
Dickinson can put a multitude of meaning into very few words. This poem would not be as effective if it were longer. It is direct and gets its point across more forcefully because of this. The first thing I noticed when I looked at the poem was how short it is. When I read it, it was even more shocking how deeply it spoke to me. I did not expect her to be able to convey her idea in so little words.
Dickinson’s choice to not have each line rhyme brings a more serious tone to the poem. It doesn’t make it seem cliché. The main aspect that I enjoy about Emily Dickinson’s writing is that it is short and sweet, without dramatization or embellishment. She gets at the core of an emotion without trying to make a big show of it.
Dickinson expresses universal ideas in her writing. It is amazing how the words of a woman who lived in a completely different day and age can still speak to people today. Her talent lies in her ability to grasp common themes in the human psyche and summarize them in a clear and unambiguous way.
Part IV: Parody
All you see is appearance at first
And then, the shallow traits-
And then, you see deeper
Walking into a flood of personality
And you nearly lose your footing;
And then you step into the murk
At the bottom of it all;
And then, you deny the truth you feel slosh beneath your feet
You cannot see at all,
For you are blinded by the water rushing round,
Until it pulls you under.
Part V: Interview
I discussed the poem The Heart Asks Pleasure First with my mom. She is a psychologist so she was able to connect this poem to some theories discussed in psychology. The first thing that this poem reminded her of was the ‘pleasure principle’ which is the observation that people operate seeking to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. She said that, “in development, we teach people to delay pleasure in order to learn self-control and prepare them for being able to endure pain later on.” This made me think of the common phrase “you can’t always get what you want.” If you learn to deal with little insignificant instances of pain, it can usually benefit you later in life to be more flexible. In some ways this is a survival skill. The more pain you can endure the greater chance you have of overcoming the pain and surviving through it.
We also talked about why pain is a practical thing. Physical pain obviously helps you to know when something is wrong with your body and motivates you to try to stop the pain by healing an injury. What I was wondering was why emotional pain is practical. I think that sometimes it can be a hindrance because humans tend to get caught up in their emotions and dramatize situations. My mom pointed out that emotional pain can help you avoid situations where you might end up hurt, but she did agree that it can sometimes create more problems.
We both agreed that when Dickinson spoke about the heart wanting to go to sleep, she was speaking both literally and emotionally. A person could “go to sleep” emotionally by becoming numb to everything in an attempt to block out pain. Dickinson could also view sleep as one of the only human escapes from suffering besides death.
I enjoyed talking with my mom about this poem. She brought a unique perspective that I couldn’t necessarily have gotten with someone who isn’t a psychologist. It’s also nice to get the opinion of someone outside of my English class who isn’t a Penn Charter 11th grader.
Part VI: Author’s Afterword
I feel like I’ve gotten a lot out of this project. I’ve always enjoyed reading poetry, but sometimes felt that English class ruins it. Sometimes we dissect the poems too much until they lose their impact and meaning. In some ways, I did this with the poem I chose. In other ways, reanalyzing it over and over helped teach me how to look past the surface of a poem and really get at the heart of what the poet is trying to say. I also like trying to relate the poem to personal things in my life. When I spoke about the poem with my mom, I found that it brought us to a number of conversation topics that I never would have expected to talk about. Poems can have such diverse meanings among people. They are so personal to both the author of the poem and the reader. They are concise, yet fraught with meaning.
I liked reading Emily Dickinson’s poems. It’s amazing how relatable they are. Almost all of the poems that we read in class had some sort of personal significance to me. I thought it was interesting how the shorter poems often made a bigger impact on me than the longer ones. I think it is partially because they get their point across more quickly, but also because they are usually more complicated. In class I often had a hard time joining in on the discussions because my interpretations of the poems were so personal to me that I had difficulty articulating them. Dickinson has a way of getting to the gut of an emotion that’s normally almost impossible to put into words.
