The Master
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool, --
Deals one imperial Thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
When Winds take Forests in their Paws -
The Universe - is still -
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool, --
Deals one imperial Thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
When Winds take Forests in their Paws -
The Universe - is still -
-Emily Dickinson
This poem really struck me as being noteworthy because of the metaphor that Dickinson utilizes. She compares the power of God to a musician playing the piano. The "hammers" are piano hammers, as pictured in the video below, which are triggered when God strikes a key on the piano. The keys can be struck in ways that dole out a faint noise far away, which could be defined as an unimportant event that excludes you, or it could be a "thunderbolt", which I interpreted as a catastrophic event in one's life. This metaphor is beautiful in how it depicts life as mere music, God is only "fumbling at your Soul", trying to practice his music. The final two lines of the poem leave her work to be puzzling and ambiguous; "When Winds take Forests in their Paws -/The Universe - is still -". These two lines differ from the rest of the poem as they personify "Winds" as having "Paws" to bring the universe to a complete standstill. Is God striking his "thunderbolt" to make this occur, or do the Winds have a mind of their own?
This poem really struck me as being noteworthy because of the metaphor that Dickinson utilizes. She compares the power of God to a musician playing the piano. The "hammers" are piano hammers, as pictured in the video below, which are triggered when God strikes a key on the piano. The keys can be struck in ways that dole out a faint noise far away, which could be defined as an unimportant event that excludes you, or it could be a "thunderbolt", which I interpreted as a catastrophic event in one's life. This metaphor is beautiful in how it depicts life as mere music, God is only "fumbling at your Soul", trying to practice his music. The final two lines of the poem leave her work to be puzzling and ambiguous; "When Winds take Forests in their Paws -/The Universe - is still -". These two lines differ from the rest of the poem as they personify "Winds" as having "Paws" to bring the universe to a complete standstill. Is God striking his "thunderbolt" to make this occur, or do the Winds have a mind of their own?
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