Question

Which of these excerpts from poems by Emily Dickinson uses irony? My cocoon tightens, colors tease, I'm feeling for the air; A dim capacity for wings Degrades the dress I wear. Could she have guessed that it would be; Could but a crier of the glee Have climbed the distant hill; Had not the bliss so slow a pace, — Who knows but this surrendered face Were undefeated still? One dignity delays for all, One mitred afternoon. None can avoid this purple, None evade this crown. There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes. Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the meanings are. Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea, — Past the houses, past the headlands, Into deep eternity! NextReset

Answer 1

Answer:

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea, -

Past the houses, past the headlands,

Into deep eternity!

Explanation:

Although she is mentioning the exultation and the royal color of death, the poem itself begins with the narrator saying that she cannot breathe - that she doesn't want to die.

Answer 2

Answer:

"Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea, — Past the houses, past the headlands, Into deep eternity!" is the correct answer.

Explanation:

Emily Dickinson was an American poet and her role in literature is as important as Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, among others.

Irony is a rhetorical device in which the speaker contrasts the expectations of a particular situation and the real results. The excerpt belongs to a poem entitled VII, published in Dickinson's complete poems. There, we can see how the speaker starts talking about exultation is normal for the soul (which could be understood as life itself) and then closes with the last line referring to a deep eternity, understood as death, which contrasts with the ver first line from the excerpt.