Essay
Analysing 'I like to see it lap the Miles'
Analysing 'I like to see it lap the Miles' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘I like to see it lap the Miles -’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents attitudes and feelings about nature/animals/power in ‘I like to
see it lap the Miles’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
In this poem Dickinson describes her fascination with trains in a child-like wonder and enthusiasm
in her new-England, modern and industrialised surroundings. It is a riddle poem that uses a series
of metaphors to characterise a steam train.
In ‘I like to see it lap the Miles’, Dickinson uses various techniques to elevate the train to the status
of an animal. To bring the train to life she uses imagery such as figurative verbs that compare the
train to several indistinct animals: ‘lap the Miles’ and ‘lick the Valleys’ has connotations of feline
movements; the image is of the train covering great distance as easily as a cat drinks milk. The
repeated reflexive pronoun helps to confer the agency of a living creature onto the inanimate
object: Dickinson sees it ‘feed itself’ at a waterstop, and then ‘chase itself’ towards the end of the
poem, at once playing with the image of a sequence of connected carriages and comparing it to a cat
chasing it’s tail.
Another way Dickinson personifies the steam train to portray her attitudes and feelings towards
trains is through her recreation of its physical movements, conveying a sense of admiration and
curiosity. The movement of the train is described with the dynamic verb ‘step/ Around a Pile of
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