Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 3 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
By DIANA BIRD
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
A challenge in the game of words some poets especially enjoy is succinctness. How much can one say in a few words? Emily Dickinson (18301880) prized expression just short of the epigram. All her poems are short. Two in which she expresses the pain of living might have been Composed at nearly the same time.
The Heart Asks Pleasure First reminds me of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, his 23 deft lines characterizing life from infancy to second childishness (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII).
Dickinson’s eight-line portrayal of human longing takes us swiftly from hoping for pleasure (We all had happy childhoods?), to praying that death will come.
She couches her feelings in physical terms — pleasure, relief from pain, looking for a “powder,” sleep. But in the next to last line, we learn from her reference to an “Inquisitor” that her suffering is mental, not physical.
Dickinson does not tell us who the Inquisitor is, who is making demands, who wants information. She understands that the reader will have an answer that comes from within. Perhaps she was leaving a way out for her doubting self. The. heart asks pleasure first., And then, excuse from pain; And then., those little anodynes That deaden suffering; And then, to go to sleep; And then, if it should he The will of its Inquisitor, The liberty to die.
In Of Course I Prayed, with 12 lines, she tells us that she could not find Divine help for her mental anmiich uml fpolc that a lnvincr OnH
84.2%