Je Ne Sais Pas

The romanticism has been one of the most representative literary movements in the United States and Europe since XIXth century, overall because of it way to represent the human being as individual, here it is not very important the social aspect of people but things like the passions, the desires and the sorrow are elements really necessary to create a romantic text. At the same time someromantic features are in relation with other artistic manifestations as the Existencialism in wich it is also important the notion of individual, the feelings, fears, etc. Here the difference is existencialism works those aspects in a metaphysical way, the spiritual condition of humanity and the relation with the world the man builds and perceives. This text it’s going to work with two importants andknown romantic poets as Emily Dicknson and Edgar Allan Poe and two specific poems from them: El dorado and I heard a fly buzz when I died. The mean idea is to contrast both of the authors and their poetic devices in the order to establish similarities and differences between them and to determine how several aspects of their lives and context could influence their poetry.

In the poem “El dorado”the speaker is a man, a knight who is looking for a lost land, but he never finds it, he gets old, die and cannot achieve his purpose. But after the death he’s invited to continue looking for he wants to get, El dorado, the mythical place. Poe in his essay philosophy of composition talks about the construction of the poem, here we have several differences from the structure of the poems byDickinson.
First of all for Poe there is no coincidence, all his poems are created taking in to account different facts and events as he explains in the structure of the raven. He is rigorous in that aspect. Also in this respect, Poe proposes that in the creation of a text it is necessary to have clear the mean intention is going to be transmitted and the denouement of the story. According with this therest of the story will be built in a more effective way and the text won’t lose it essence and sense. In contrast, as we see in the article Existencial dramas we have other structures in Dickinson’s poems, this author follow an aristotelian organization, this way to write the poems has three specific moments: A problem, a crisis and a denouement. The problem or situation in I heard a fly buzzwhen I dead, is like in several poems of her: The conscious of being died, and the attitude the speaker takes to face the death. In this part the character is not so disturbed, he/she is taking his/her new state in a calm and peaceful way:
“I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.”
The crisis orclimax can be found among the 2nd and 3rd stanza when the speaker realices he/she is condemned to dissapear, is not in this world more, is just a corpse:
“The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,-and thenThere interposed a fly”
There is no time to cry more, it’s the moment to entomb the corpse. Finally the denouement is in the last stanza when again the speaker is conscious about the truth, the death, but at this moment he/she is immersed in whole darkness and the world of shadows: “And then the windows failed, and then I couldn’t see to see”.
The fly is and important object of the story,this insect is and archetype of Death, of funeral and tomb. The fly is present in every moment in the poem and justify the state of the narrator, it’s just a corpse, a dead who won’t live anymore.
It’s is notorious the parameters used in the construction of a poem by Dickinson and Poe are different. Also it is interesting to say the structure of Dickinson’s poems is used by many existencial...