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Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's Poem I Like To See It Lap The Miles

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Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's Poem I Like To See It Lap The Miles
Emily Dickinson's poem “I like to see it lap the Miles”, is greatly comparable to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manner”s “I like to see it lap the Miles” is about a train that is moving along a track in the mountains, while “Manners” is about a grandfather teaching his grandchild about manners while driving a wagon. Within both of the poems there is a theme of new technology, however the authors describe this theme from contrasting perspectives, with Bishop being more hopeful of the future than the fearful Dickinson. However while the two authors have very different perspectives they use multiple common techniques to exemplify their ideas including the onomatopoeias, the structure of their poems, and a difference in vocabulary.
The first way
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Alike to Dickinson, Bishop uses the onomatopoeia to exemplify an animal, although instead of …show more content…
The poem also continuously has four lines within each stanza and therefore consists of a tetrameter. By using a mixture of the rhyming couplet, the abcb structure and the tetrameter Bishop forms a continuous and repetitive mood that creates a predictable and comforting tone. By constructing this comforting tone Bishop is able to add to her eventual interpretation of hope for the future of new technology. On the other hand Dickinson uses the unpredictable structure of “I like to see it lap the Miles” to add to her contrasting theme of fear of future technology. Within Dickinson's poem while the third stanza randomly has five lines, while the rest of the stanzas each have four lines. By at first using a tetrameter and then randomly adding a stanza with five lines Dickinson is able to draw the reader into a comforting tone and then throws them off by adding a line with a different structure. Dickinson does this to add to the poem's mood of unease about the new technology. This unpredictable and unclear structure adds to the tone and outlook of uncertainty within Dickinson’s poem. Therefore both Dickinson and Bishop use structure to help develop the ideas within their poems, but they do so in contrasting ways, with Dickinson using it to create a tone of uneasiness and Bishop creating a comforting tone. The last way

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