explanation of the poem day by Emily Dickinson
Answers
Explanation:
The poem can be divided into two halves: an eight-line section describing the sunrise, and an eight-line section, describing the speaker’s lack of knowledge of the sunset. In this poem Emily describes the sunset and sunrise, as a village, and the things in that village. But the poem also describes the difficulties of recognising the world around us. The sunrise is described in terms of a small village, with church steeples, town news, and ladies’ bonnets. The sunset, on the other hand, is characterised as the gathering home of a flock. In this poem she probes nature’s mysteries through the lens of the rising and setting Sun. Emily begins by emphasising that she is going to tell her audience ‘How the Sun rose.’ She symbolically compares the Sun’s rays to ribbons that are let loose one at a time. The colourful rays slowly untangle over the ocean where the church steeples seem to ‘swim in Amethyst.’ As the bright fire of the Sun appears, the darkened blackness first turns blue, before taking on its brightness in the full glow of the Sun. Then suddenly the Sun’s appearance spreads quickly. Emily then tells us how the entire nature is waking up and colour can be seen as far away as the hills, while the birds have started to sing. Emily then emphasises in her surprised musing, ‘That must have been the Sun!’ It seems as if she was seeing it for the first time and wondering at the effect the mere rising of the Sun has had on all that she sees. Though when she says that ‘But how he set, I know not’ leads the readers to some drama and ambiguity about her thoughts. It seemed to her that as the sunset, she saw ‘a purple stile’ where ‘little Yellow boy and girls were climbing.’ She sees children climbing over a barrier, possibly going home after a day of tending sheep or perhaps simply on their way home from school. After climbing the stile, the children finally reach the other side, which signs the lowest point of the Sun before it disappears to rise again in the other world. And what causes the Sun to finally disappear is that a cleric or perhaps even a householder shepherd closes a gate and leads away the flock of children or perhaps sheep. At this point, the speaker would be in darkness and have no idea what happens next.