Name: Learn about METAPHORS in English with a poem by Emily Dickinson
Uploaded: 2021-10-17T02:25:18.000Z
Duration: 23 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Gill from engVid, and today's lesson is a poem.

When I did a previous poem called: "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, people said:

"Oh, please give us some more poems", so here is one which I hope you enjoy.

Okay, so it's a poem by a woman called Emily Dickinson, and she was American.

And she lived from 1830 to 1886, and she lived in a place called Amherst in Massachusetts

On the eastern side of America; New England.

She was the kind of person who likes to stay at home most of the time; she didn't go out

She stayed in her own room, I think writing poetry most of the time; maybe writing letters

But she wrote a lot of poetry; and not much of it was published in her lifetime, but it

was found after she died, and then it was all published.

I think she only published one or two poems in her lifetime.

So, here is the first half of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

There are some words which may be unfamiliar, but I'll explain them as we go along.

"I'll tell you how the sun rose, - A ribbon at a time.

The steeples swam in amethyst, The news like squirrels ran."

Okay, so there may be a few words there that you're not familiar with, so let's have a

So, she's talking to somebody; maybe the person who's reading the poem, and she's telling

She's going to describe what it looked like when the sun came up in the morning.

So, when you see the sun and the clouds in the sky sometimes, you have sort of lines

Be like ribbons; pieces of silk, ribbons that people put in their hair and so on.

So, the way it looked as the sun rose, there were coloured lines in the sky-okay-like that.

So, a ribbon at a time as the sun came up, these lines appeared.

The steeples... "steeples" are on a building; they're a pointed thing, like this.

So, it's often usually a church building where you have a pointed...

A "steeple" or a "spire", so that's a steeple - that pointed bit.

So, if she's looking out of her bedroom window, seeing the town and seeing the sun coming

up, she's seeing all the buildings as well in the town.

There may be several church buildings with a pointed spire or steeple.

It sounds strange because it's more metaphorical; that's why it's poetry.

It's not literally true, but the metaphor.

So, there's a sort of blue around the steeples in the sky; a deep blue colour.

So, it's as if the steeples are swimming; they're almost moving against the sky because

of the effects of the light as the sun comes up.

It's almost as if they're in water; swimming in water.

So, the blue is like water, as well as being the blue of the sky.

Sometimes in a poem it's not exactly clear what's happening; what's going on.

The news that the sun is rising, perhaps; that a new day is beginning.

So, people start to wake up, and animals and birds start to wake up.

The main thing is that it has a long tail, like that.

So, little squirrels, they can go up a tree, and think things like that, you know.

So, the news spreads very quickly that it's a new day; everybody wakes up and thinks:

So, these are called "verses" where you have a break in between.

Or another word for it is if you're being really particular about your...

The words you're using, you'd call it a "stanza" - that's a more professional word.

Each section is called a "stanza" with a gap in between.

So, second verse, second stanza - so, what happens next?

"The hills untied their bonnets, The bobolinks begun.

Then I said softly to myself," Quotation marks: "'That must have been the

So, it's very sort of conversational in style; very normal language.

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Learn about METAPHORS in English with a poem by Emily Dickinson

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