Theses

Metrical Analysis Essay
In her poem “How many times these low feet staggered”, Emily Dickinson guides the reader through an examination of a deceased housewife. Moving from her feet to her mouth, forehead, hair, and fingers, the poem spotlights housewife’s features in a gradual revealing that ultimately fails to rid the reader of the sense of mystery and anonymity. Through the use of a four-beat accentual meter, Dickinson establishes an underlying forward-jerking rhythm and builds up the expectation for a consistent pulse. In the second and third stanzas, however, the trochaic tetrameter with a regular leading dactyl is disrupted by further dactylic substitutions and frequent caesura. By varying the stresses and creating a disjunction between the rhythmic expectation and the visual caesura cues, Dickinson portrays as futile the attempt to understand what the housewife’s rhythmic, routine life was like by visual postmortem examination alone.

Poetry Comparison Essay
In Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” the exposure of the speaker’s insanity occurs with a linguistic shift halfway through the poem. By juxtaposing the effect of the style and form with the effect of the shift, Browning and Lowell successfully portray characters that transition between two extremes of the insane mind.

OED Assignment
In John Donne’s “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” the tension between the power of the speaker’s verbal eloquence and the power of the mistress’s physicality is encapsulated in line 2, where Donne uses the word “labour” both in its verb form and in its noun form: “Until I labour, I in labour lie” (2). This repetition creates a juxtaposition that emphasizes the differences in the subtly varying definitions of verb “labour” – definitions which, when considered simultaneously, foreshadow the bawdy tone of the poem and accentuate characteristics of the poet and the speaker.

Criticism Review
The question that arises upon reading “The Storyteller” is whether Benjamin is writing an essay – or a story. While the lack of characters and plot and mainly informative nature of the piece characterizes “The Storyteller” as an essay, there are significant indications of story-like traits in Benjamin’s writing. Indeed, Benjamin seems to craft this essay as a hybrid of information and story, simultaneously adding to it both vividness and ambiguity.