340 Group thoughts

340 seemed simultaneously straightforward and a challenge to our group, our thoughts were as follows
Dickinson's standard 8686 stanza setup with a content that is anything but. Caesuras and mid/intra line dashes repeatedly readdress the reader's attention to the poem. This all abounds in a composition containing no ending punctuation whatsoever, we are left (as often is the case with Dickinson) floating off the end of the poem by yet another dash.

The content describes a breakdown, the death of an idea, the loss of reason, the banality of reason, and if all other interpretations fail a sense that all is not well. The whole of the poem's content happens in the mind of the speaker and no where in the physical world. One aspect of this construct we noticed was the loss of reason and use of contradiction in the fourth stanza.

"As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here - "

The poem has presented Heaven as a Bell, whose action is to of course ring, and Being the one receptive of that ringing. Yet Silence is simultaneously an entity (some strange Race) and the lack of noise. In this poetic construction is silence hell? Or rather is it the companion of one who has lost the ability to "hear" Heaven's bell? Regardless the poem is esoterically veneered in these constructs.

Annotations:

-She had a breakdown
-The death of an idea
-Broken stream of consciousness
-Somber, melancholy.
-... something is creaking, then suddenly boots of lead. From quiet to loud
-finished knowing that thought
-...loss of self, the nothingness of reality, the tone is the absence of being. Fits the scene of death, sorrow.
-An elegy of an idea of herself