Paragraph of Analysis of "To His Coy Mistress"

     The relationship between "To His Coy Mistress" and the  "live fast, die young, make a pretty corpse" is all-too clear in the second stanza, exhibited by gruesome imagery that contrasts with the rest of the poem. Whereas the first stanza laments that the speaker cannot focus on the object of his affection's beauty for all eternity, expressing in an admiring tone, and the last stanza states in a passionate tone his desire to live in the moment, the second stanza has a much less affectionate tone. He discusses the "deserts of vast eternity" (24), i.e. death, similarly referencing a "marble vault" and  "worms" (26-27). This discussion of death is a complete reversal of the rest of the poem, intended to shock the object of his affections from her comfortable refuge of her coyness into his awaiting arms. In other words, he intends to make his mistress uncomfortable so as to reduce her coyness and increase his attractiveness in the grand scheme of things. He is telling her that she will certainly make a pretty corpse, but that the only one to enjoy this pretty corpse will be the worms, causing her "quaint honor [to] turn to dust" (29). He is telling her not to waste his affections by holding him away until he dies, at which point so would his affections as "all [his] lust" turns "into ashes" (30). Rather, the two of them, by the speaker's thinking, should enjoy the time they have, else her beauty will ultimately have had no purpose- the "beauty [that] shall no more be found" will have been wasted (25). So as not to simply jar her from her complacency and cause her to hate him, he provides himself as a solution for her newly discovered problem of her beauty's ephemeral nature.

Paragraph of Analysis of "Woman Work"

Thesis: The first fourteen lines compose an urgent, rapid tone representative of the woman's life that slows and relaxes in the latter half of the poem.

In the first half of the poem, the women talks about all of the things she has to do. She says that she has "got the children to tend / the clothes to mend / the floor to mop / the food to shop" (1-4). The implication behind repeated, anaphoric "got" is that it is an obligation; the repeated infinitives mimic the imperative meaning of the phrase "to do." The rhymes of the poem draw attention to the repeated infinitives and to the short, clipped style of the poem, in turn illustrating the rapid events and necessities of the woman's life. These come together to form the stressed tone of a lady with too many things to do to relax, a situation altogether too common in the typically rushed lifestyle of the modern day.

Paragraph of Analysis of "One dignity delays for all"

Thesis: This poem takes a cynical tone towards the general populace because they value the dead more than the living.

Dickinson focuses her poem on a funeral, ironically the area that she feels people center their attention too much on. She spends two stanzas presenting this image, from the "coach [...] and footmen" (5) to the "dignified Attendants" (9). In doing so, she illustrates for the reader how much people value the dead, and how much time they spend on a mere corpse. By contrast, Dickinson does not mention the living being that the corpse once was, just as those who might see a funeral procession passing by and feel pity for the corpse would not consider the same person worthy of thought if they happened to pass on the street. Dickinson illustrates by her focus how people have internalized these relative importances to be considered normal, despite the ridiculousness of valuing a body over a living person.