Figurative Language in Emily Dickinson's Work

Emily Dickinson effectively used a range of figurative language to create clear sensory details and conjure a sweep of emotions in her writing. For example, she used personification to connect readers to sensory experiences such as silence at twilight or the tumult of a snowstorm. For conveying feelings, she could turn to similes to quickly transmit the impatience of longing or the shock and numbness of loss. With extended metaphors, she could do both by describing the intoxicating joy of a clear summer day or the awe of a powerful thunderstorm. Emily Dickinson used personification, similes, and metaphors to convey both details for the senses as well as depths of emotions.

One of the forms of figurative language that Dickinson utilized was personification. In her poem, "There's a certain slant of light," Emily Dickinson writes, "The landscape listens," and, "Shadows hold their breath." This creates imagery of a heavy sort of silence, in which a scene is almost eerily quiet. In another example, the speaker of "The Sky is Low" calls clouds "mean," and assigns nature a female gender. She also claims that the wind "complains", and deems it male. Additionally, the narrator personifies a snowflake by stating that it "decides" where it will travel. By ascribing these human characteristics to nature, the reader relates to details of the howling wind or a snowflake that swoops backwards and forwards.

Another literary concept commonly used by Emily Dickinson is the simile. Her poem, "If you were coming in the Fall," has a simile in which she compares the way that she would "brush the summer by" to how housewives shoo flies away. This simile shows how impatiently she would dismiss the entire summer in her longing for the visit in the fall. A second poem which contains similes is "After great pain a formal feeling comes." In this piece of literature, the speaker says, "nerves sit ceremonious like tombs" and "quartz contentment, like a stone." These lines convey the feeling of cold numbness after a loss.

Finally, Emily Dickenson could use extended metaphor, or allegory, to convey both sensory details and depth of emotion. In her poem, "The Lighting is a yellow Fork," Emily Dickinson starts with a metaphor comparing lighting to a yellow fork. This metaphor expands to an allegory that explains the origin of the fork, referring to "Tables in the sky," conjuring up images of a household above the clouds and religious notions. The "inadvertent fingers" which dropped the fork allude to a God capable of making clumsy mistakes, providing imagery of a very human deity with just a few words. The metaphor creates both concrete visions of the storm and conveys feelings of awe in the face of such power. Another example of allegory in Dickinson's work is, "I taste a Liquor never brewed."