Text: In lands i never saw - they say
Task: Writing a textual analysis
OBJECTIVES
Cultural: poetry from USA
Intertextual: images and metaphors
Linguistic:i mproving writing skills
In lands I never saw - they say by Emily Dickinson
In lands I never saw - they say
Immortal Alps look down
Whose Bonnets touch the firmament
Whose Sandals touch the town
Meek at whose everlasting feet
A Myriad Daisy play
Which Sir are you and which am I
Upon an August day?
The title
If I read the title, before reading the poem, I expect the poem will tell me that somebody says what somebody told him/her about lands he/she has never saw.
Denotative analysis
In this poem there is a speaking voice saying that somebody says that in lands he/she never saw, old and high Alps touch the sky with their tops and at the bottom they touch the town. In the valley, there are a lot of daisies moved by the wind. In the end of the poem, the speaking voice identifies with the daisies.
Key words
Alps, Daisy. To me these are key words, because the poet wants to underline the height of mountains compared to daisies, the personification of people.
Connotative analysis
In the poem the rhythm of lines is trochaic because unstressed syllables are followed by stressed syllables.
There are pauses at the end of every line, after the first stanza there is a longer pause, because the poet finishes to speak about the Alps and begins to dedicate some lines to the valley.
The rhyme scheme is A B C B D A E A, "say" rhymes with "play" and "day" and "down" rhymes with "town".
There are words that have vowels sound longer than another. For example, saw, down, whose, town, feet, play, day.
Reading the poem we can identify some semantic groups of words that deal with a specific subject. Lands, Alps, Daisy, Firmament remember nature; Bonnets and Sandals remember clothes; immortal and everlasting are adjectives; August is a season. and they ll refer to the passing of time
In the poem there are some sound figures of speech:
- Assonance: "brown" and "battleground" have the repetition of the same vowel sound "a" at the end of some syllables.
- Consonance: "immortal" and "firmament" have the repetition of the same consonant "m" at the beginning of some syllables.
In the poem there are some semantic figures of speech like personification:
- Immortal Alps: old, that last forever.
- Look down: the poetess attribute the sense of the sight to mountains, because they are high and they can look at everything.
- Bonnets, Sandals: the poetess give mountains accessories using by people.
- Daisies: there are people.
- Daisies play: there are moved by the wind, but the poetess give them a human characteristic, because daisies are people.
In the poem there is a figure of speech: in the statement "Which Sir are you and which am I...?" the subjects are in the end.