This World is Not Conclusion - Notes #2

‘This World is not Conclusion’

Central Symbol	Techniques	Others
-          ‘Tooth’ -          She uses tooth pain as a metaphor of the pain and darkness in life -          It seems like they cannot be avoided, ‘stilled’, even by ‘Narcotics’ -          Dickinson’s portrayal of entrapment -          She has accepted the fact of being trap with suffering -          Only solution is to have faith and to believe in the possible after life -          She indicates the powerfulness of faith, in comparison to human power -          She suggests that science cannot cure pain – the narcotics, subscribed by doctors or ‘philosophy’ by ‘scholars’ cannot explain the reason -          Faith is something that is hard to understand	-          This poem contains Dickinson’s usual strange use of punctuation -          Other than the first line, Dickinson uses hyphens instead of full stops in the rest of her poem.  -          The use of full stop exclusively in the beginning: ‘This World is not Conclusion.’ presents a sense of certainty.  She does this to convey that she is definite about this statement -          She believes that there’s more to life than her current suffering. -          This displays the importance of faith: it is the only thing that is true and solid to her; it gives her hope and keeps her going -          The rest of the poem is filled with hyphens: ‘A Species stands beyond –‘.  -          Dickinson’s use of caesura breaks the poem in to fragments.  -          Contrasting to the first line, it evokes a sense of uncertainty -          It hammer home the question of religion -          The hyphens serve the purpose of allowing the readers to think about the words like ‘Crucifixion’ and ‘Hallelujahs roll’.  -          It questions the reader – can faith serve as the cure for the metaphor of ‘tooth’ pain?	-          The depiction of fear -          The structure of the poem is significant in portraying Dickinson’s fear of the ‘Species stands beyond’.  -          The poem is a free verse, which contrasts to her usual use of iambic tetra/tri metre with regular 4-lines stanza.  -          This suggests that she is afraid that there will not be an afterlife -          It has a feeling where she rushes throughout the poem to get rid of the terror -          Also it emphasises Dickinson’s central message regarding the religion -          A reference to ‘Crucifixion’ again gives a sense of euphemism.  She looks up to the example who got into heaven because he has ‘Faith’ -          She uses the idea of religion to calm herself down -          So that she will no longer be afraid of the uncertainty of her afterlife
This compares to What mystery pervades a well when the speaker confesses ‘the ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house’, claiming that man-kind can never comprehend God’s intention	Hyphens are also excessively used in Behind Me – dips Eternity – where hyphens are  used to create pauses.  It encapsulates words like ‘Eternity’ and ‘immortality’, showing entrapment and the fact that the speaker cannot find a way to escape	The metaphor of ‘narrow fellow’ representing a snake is another example of euphemism.  The speaker attempts to make anger more pleasant so to calm herself down

Entrapment/ Hope and Hopelessness / Afterlife