Journal #27

I am currently listening to a previous English class sing Emily Dickinson's poem Narrow Fellow in the Grass to the tune of Amazing Grace.  I think it is weird that poems are written to the same tune as songs.  Emily Dickinson was pressured by her family to be Christian, and Amazing Grace is a song about the grace of God so it kind of makes sense that her poems are written to the same tune as this song.  Even though she was pressured to be a Christian, she struggled with her own beliefs.  She would feel guilty if she thought thoughts against Christianity, but she was not really sure what she wanted.  From what I have read about her, she is kind of crazy and withdrawn.  She spent most of her life in her room writing poetry, and most of her poems were not even published until after she had passed away.  I think that Emily Dickinson wrote her poems to the tunes of songs that had some sort of meaning to her.  For example, Amazing Grace is a song about the grace of God and her religion was something that she struggled with.  The sun in Amazing Grace is part of nature, and Emily Dickinson liked nature.  It seems like a lot of poets write about nature and religion.  I think that tunes of Emily Dickinson's poems are significant to what her poems are about and to what she is dealing with in her life and also are similar to her writing style.  Emily Dickinson is known as a very famous poet today, and that is because her poems are viewed as awesome by a lot of people.  She wrote over 2,000 poems in her life time and they all had some sort of theme from her life in them.  Emily Dickinson liked to write her poems to the tunes of folkways because she liked folkways.  I think its cool and weird that she wrote poems to song tunes but hey maybe that is what was cool back then.