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Part Four: Time and Eternity

X

I DIED for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

“For beauty,” I replied.

“And I for truth,—the two are one;

We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,      

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.
 

Emily Dickinson, without doubt, earned her title as one of the Masters of Literature. From the hundreds of poems she wrote throughout her life, even if she stored them secret in her desk drawer, comes the life of poetry, the spirit of art, the inspiration of writing, and the eternal aspects of Beauty and Truth.

“I died for beauty” is poem full of spiritual, artistic, and humanistic allegories which transcend time, space, and even death. Although there are many interpretations and analysis for this poem, the words contain a deeper meaning that will always reflect to the...

Who then will not look with awe upon this our chameleon, or who, at least, will look with greater admiration on any other being? This creature, man, whom Asclepius the Athenian, by reason of this very mutability, this nature capable of transforming itself, quite rightly said was symbolized in the mysteries by the figure of Proteus. This is the source of those metamorphoses, or transformations, so celebrated among the Hebrews and among the Pythagoreans; for even the esoteric theology of the Hebrews at times transforms the holy Enoch into that angel of divinity which is sometimes called malakh-ha-shekhinah and at other times transforms other personages into divinities of other names; while the Pythagoreans transform men guilty of crimes into brutes or even, if we are to believe Empedocles, into plants; and Mohammed, imitating them, was known frequently to say that the man who deserts the divine law becomes a brute. And he was right; for it is not the bark that makes the tree, but its ins...

Language, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and...

On my watch, William Butler Yeats can be classified as a Master of Literature; his poems and the meanings of this writings trancend in ways that go beyond his self. Although poems can be identified as expression of the soul, poets like him, create poems with a "mystic" composition that go beyond what the artists feels or thinks; in other words, this is a good example of a poem that goes beyond the life of the creator. "A Coat" is a poem which transmits much more context through what is presented. Although the poets die, their poems live on. 
 

"A Coat"
William Butler Yeats

I made my song a coat 

Covered with embroideries 

Out of old mythologies 

From heel to throat; 

But the fools caught it, 

Wore it in the world’s eyes 

As though they’d wrought it. 

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise 

In walking naked.
 

In literature classes, one would normally analyze the words, what the poem meant in reference to...