Dhruv's post

I Had Been Hungry All the Years

Emily Dickinson expresses her yearning for more fulfilment through a stronger connection with society, which is not attained due to Dickinson’s reclusive nature. She sustains this through the extended metaphor of food which symbolises the joys of life and hunger to emphasise her longing to belong. In the opening line, she clearly states “I had been hungry all the years”, and further underlines her sense of loneliness that she felt as an outsider, “I looked in windows for the wealth I could not hope for mine”. She uses sensory words such as “trembling”, “touched” and transferred epithet; the wine as “curious”, to show her unfamiliarity with human experiences. Dickinson contrasts this with her stronger connection with the natural world through the metaphor, “nature’s dining room”. Dickinson further extends this to juxtapose the abundance of life’s pleasures available to her, with the “crumb” that she has become so accustomed to. Dickinson uses a natural simile to depict her lack of belonging, comparing herself to “berry of a mountain bush transplanted to the road”. Her underlying philosophy is that one may strive to belong to a certain way of life, however when finally given the opportunity, one may turn away from those connections due to their former beliefs and convictions. Her metaphorical revelation “I found that hunger was a way of persons outside windows the entering takes away”, concludes that our experiences may make it difficult to make new connections, regardless of our desire to belong. Thus, Emily Dickinson suggests that our experiences and perceptions shape our ability to share connections.