From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
Message-Id: <e79c365.34f8b703@aol.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 20:16:49 EST
To: emweb@fmgmt.mgmt.utoronto.ca
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Subject: Re: #288
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Jana:

Your reading of #228 is a good one.  May I suggest a couple of things,
however.  
Try reading the poem aloud in two different ways.  In one, think of the writer
as a lonely depressed soul.  In the other, think of the writer as a strong-
willed woman who is simply making a statement about how she sees her life,
with pride, and maybe a little amusement, not trying to reassure herself, but
to tell the world, to state a fact.  You can't tell this from the poem alone,
but Dickinson was not an outcast, or a poor lonely woman, although she spent a
great deal of time with herself.  She was an extremely bright person, a gifted
poet who went off in directions that were quite unprecedented for her time.
Her poetry, which she decided to make her life work, could not be improved by
talking with others.  Darned few people of her day understood it.  You are
right about Dickinson not caring  much about "they."  Your point about the
frog giving itself away, possibily leading to harm, is something I'd never
thought of, but it's there.  Another way of thinking about the bog is that it
is filled with lower biological creatures (like crowds of uncaring souls,
maybe) who hear the croaking, but what difference does that make?  It's those
"nobodies" you mention, and what a way that is to spend a life!

Keep at it!

Louis