Emily Dickinson

Hi everyone! It's been quite long since I wrote my latter post as college stuff have been keeping me really busy. A few weeks ago I was longing for drawing so badly, so I decided to try out something different from what I had been doing so far. It was one of my American literature lessons and after a chat with a classmate what made me realise how I wanted my next pencil drawing to look like and the poet I was going to get the inspiration from - the one and only -  Emily Dickinson.

When I first faced the blank paper and my pencils, I was not sure at all about the elements I would like to include or even how they were going to take place in the paper to be honest. However, I was completely sure about the message I wanted to convey. Anyway, it was time to start!.1) Mrs spider was the first one on the row. One may say that it is the base of the drawing, and certain it is. As every item I drew, this one portrays Emily herself, her constantly urge to play different roles while fictonalizing herself, like if a matter of an actress would be. She is always writing poetry no matter whenever she got some sort of inspiration, a torn piece of paper or even a napkin had been worth enough to write on. Likewise, spiders never give up on weaving and creating their clever webs and so does Emily Dickinson with her poems. Both spin in silent (as women were supposed to do at that time) building  protection around them not to get hurt. This spider is a spinster one as Emily is.

2) Below, we find a skull which represents death. She usually flirted with it, so it became a very common theme in her poetry. As everybody can see, this skull is surrounded by bullets that come right from 3) the loaded gun on the right corner. Here again, she is taking the role of a loaded gun (kind of masculine) breaking with all the female images and stereotypes. It is a phallic symbol through which she stands up for being strong and immortal somehow, just as poetry and poets are. This gun is loaded with some ''love'' bullets (notice the heart at the end of them)  that go straight through 4) the book and are addressed to death so as to get its attention and show her coquette personality. Then, the reason why I decided to portray the bullets breaking through the pages of the book was basically the fact that through her poems, she evokes all those kind of feelings towards death. She is constantly playing with ambiguity , leaving a lot of things unsaid but implying instead, leaning on irony, loneliness and assigning positiveness to all the things regarded as negative. Finally, another of her most well-known traits was how passionate she felt about nature. 5) The flower that is wrapped around the gun symbolizes that, the birds, sunsets, seasons... everything that involves nature was treated as a medium to talk about that love, death and fear she endured in her life.

So...., I think that pretty much summarizes what I meant to express with this drawing. But, of course, many more interpretations are open are more than welcome, which definitely is one of the things I love most about literature. I really hope you like!!. Thanks a lot for reading and sticking around!

Love,

Ana x