I started Early – Took my Dog — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
I started Early – Took my Dog
The poems
What you need to know
I started Early – Took my Dog by Emily Dickinson (1862): a walk to the sea that becomes a chase as the tide rises, and how Dickinson uses short ballad stanzas, dashes, capitals and the sea as a man.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I started Early – Took my Dog –', 'The Mermaids in the Basement / Came out to look at me', 'And Frigates – in the Upper Floor / Extended Hempen Hands', 'Presuming Me to be a Mouse', 'But no Man moved Me – till the Tide', 'And made as He would eat me up', 'And He – He followed – close behind', 'I felt his Silver Heel / Upon my Ankle', 'Would overflow with Pearl', 'The Sea withdrew'.
Form and structure: six quatrains in the short alternating lines of hymns and ballads, with half-rhymes, a playful start, a frightening middle and a calm ending as the sea turns back at the town.
Language: dashes that break up and speed up the lines, capitals that make things grand, the sea's depths as a house with a basement and an upper floor, and the sea personified as a man who pursues the speaker.
Context: Dickinson's quiet life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and her withdrawal from society; only ten of her nearly 1,800 poems printed in her lifetime; editors who changed her punctuation and capitals until Thomas H. Johnson's edition of 1955; and her use of the hymn's common metre.
Compares well with: Hurricane Hits England (nature's power personified, felt by a woman), Stewart Island (a threatening coast), In Romney Marsh (the sea and the shore) and Where the Picnic was (the sea in the background of a walk).
