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.