Reading Emily Dickinson's 'Blazing in Gold..."

I read the poem "Blazing in Gold..." by Emily Dickinson as one of our first poems to study. It's full of vivid imagery, juicy words and sounds, and works well for a young audience as the poem itself is a kind of riddle.

First we read the text just as it is:

Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple
Leaping like Leopards to the Sky
Then at the feet of the old Horizon
Laying her spotted Face to die
Stooping as low as the Otter's Window
Touching the Roof and tinting the Barn
Kissing her Bonnet to the Meadow
And the Juggler of Day is gone 

Then we talk about what we notice. It's kept pretty informal. I suggest they can think about images made in the poem, interesting words, length of lines, length of poem itself, objects mentioned, rhythm, rhyme. It's just a "noticing" exercise at first. We don't worry about "getting it" or not or meaning or anything like that, to start.

Then I show them the illustrated version. (I made an illustration of this poem as part of my critical graduate thesis on close reading a poem.) After that, we get into the "exterior" of the poem (What does it mean?) and also "interior" (use of literary devices like alliteration and personification, rhyme scheme).

(I will have to edit this! Look for an update in the future!)

A Reading 2 Blazing in Gold Illustrated by bmadden714

 

The parts of a poem

Ther are lots of components that make a poem a poem. Here is one way of thinking about the parts of a poem:

The Interior of a Poem - what comes from the writer of the poem

Texture - the materials of a poem
Structure - the organization of the materials; the architecture
Form - the final arrangement; the complete execution

Texture (Structure + Form) = Interior of a poem

The exterior of a poem - what comes from the poem being read

Substance - what the poem is
Function - how a poem works as art
Spirit - why the poem exists

Substance + Function + Spirit = Exterior of a poem

And throughout the whole poem, both the exterior and the interior is...

Energy - the most difficult thing to examine in a poem, but the thing that makes it successful; voice, distinction, authenticity, confidence, surprise.

Energy is often the thing that gets lost when we only look at one part or another and do not keep in mind the whole.

The blind men and the elephant: experience the whole poem

When reading a poem, or when teaching a poem, we run into the danger of the same dilemma in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man feels only a part of the elephant and cannot agree what they have just touched. One says a rope (the tail), a spear (tusk), a snake (trunk), a fan (the ear). When we look at a poem and search only for its parts, we run the risk of not "seeing the elephant", that is, not experiencing the entire poem.

A poem is not a scavenger hunt; it is its own event. While looking closely at the parts of the poem can help us to experience the poem better, it is not the same as the entire experience of the poem in itself.