Because I Could Not Stop For Death Essay

Emily Dickinson was an American poet born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. It was only upon her death on May 15, 1886 that her family discovered thousands of her poems. One of her most prolific piece of work is “Because I could not stop for death” published in 1860 the poem uses personification, symbols and metaphors to highlight her concern and point of view on death as well as life. In the poem, Dickinson speaks about death in a blithe way setting the overall tone in a calm manner. The poem uses imagery and her ironic tone to give the message that death should not be feared, but instead one should make the best out of life.

In the poem “Because I could Not stop for Death”, Emily Dickinson describes death as an experience that she is looking back on. Dickinson uses a variety of elements, such as personification, imagery and irony to get her point across that death is not a dreadful event, but actually a pleasant experience. Although death is often perceived as being depressing and frightening, it should be viewed in a positive way realizing that it is the beginning of eternity.

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

In Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for Death" the main theme seems to be the acceptance of Death. Emily gives reference to the theme by using "death" in the first line. The poem is unique and interesting because she presents Death in a different way by referring to it as an escort taking her on a journey towards eternity rather than making it seem like something frightening. Each stanza of the poem breaks down the journey through the stages of her life that leads to the end where the speaker reaches eternity and she finally realizes that she is no longer living. In the fifth stanza when she refers to the coffin as her "house" gives the impression that she's comfortable with death

"Because I could not stop for Death" is one of the most puzzling poems Emily Dickinson wrote. “Scholars who stress these subversive qualities note that this poet appropriated conventional language, images, and themes and twisted them, disrupting their usual meaning.” (Dunlap, 2) In this poem, she describes death in hindsight. She commentates the experience play by play, chronicling her actions and vision from the time he arrived to pick her up in his carriage to her final resting place. In the poem, the impression of death is not portrayed as scary or daunting, but rather more as tranquil and peaceful. In the poem, death took on the image of a person. Through personification, he was portrayed more like a male suitor picking up his companion for a date. Dickinson guided us to believe that the speaker in the poem is talking and describing her journey with death to us from beyond the grave. She leads us to believe that the speaker is ghost-like or a spirit who has accepted her death and content with her boundless eternity. It is not surprising that “Because I could not stop for Death” incites so much controversy in that it presents complex and multi-dimensional concepts of both life and death, both of which are too mysterious to be fully expressed. In “Because I could not stop for Death”, Dickinson does personify both death and Immortality as people, and presents the process of dying as eternal life. However in a bizarre twist, she also personifies life. She brings

“Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson has written in 1863. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830-86, she is one of the greatest poets in American literature. Dickinson wrote love poems which it indicates strong attachment because of this it 's difficult to know if does poems where subjects of her feelings or just part of her poetic imagination. The different tension that comes from her work is due to the cause of not accepting orthodox religion, “the flood subject”- immortality, and her rebellious (Emily Dickinson). We can see that this poem is one of many that were later discovered because the title and the first line of the poem are the same. Death came to take the speaker into his carriage and drive around in it. By the first passing to a school where children play. Then passing grain field and looking at the sun. The last stop is an old “house” getting eaten by the surrounding vegetation. Lastly, she comes to realize that centuries have passed, but only feeling like days, and moving to eternity (Dickinson). The meaning of “Because I Could not stop for Death” is that journey to death and its feelings. The separation of the stanza, it shows the different steps in how death feels and word choices.

Personification is a type of figurative language one uses to give abstract ideas human-like characteristics. Dickinson uses personification in this poem because it allows the reader to understand death in a more intimate way. Death became so real to her and to her contemporaries because of the time in which she lived. Through her life experiences, the poet became intimate with death. Because of all the disease and epidemics in her lifetime, many of her loved ones passed away. These deaths were very "intense breaks in her life" (Murray). Some critics suggest that the death of her cousin was the inspiration for this poem (Semansky). In any event, death had a large impact on Dickinson's life. This impact explains why she writes so descriptively about it. In this poem, death is personified as a gentleman caller taking the lady out for a carriage ride. This personification gives the reader a better image of the writer's idea of the coming of death.

Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson processes the life leading up to death and eternal life. The speaker is telling the poem many years after death and in eternal life. She explains the journey to immortality, while also facing the problem of sacrifice and willingness to earn it. The poem is succulent in alliteration, imagery, repetition, personification and rhyme. A notable shift in almost all of the poems direction occurs as well. By doing so, Dickinson, a poet in the American Romantics era, sets forward an idea that immortality will appear in the afterlife of an individual who believes so.

Her family was well known in Massachusetts since her father was a lawyer and her grandfather was one of the college’s founders. However, Emily was quite the opposite since she was reclusive and withdrew from almost all social life in Amherst. She was not known during her time, but she wrote uplifting verses that touch the heart that are now famous (Michael Mayer, 754). In the poem “Because I could not stop for Death” the speaker dies many years ago, which is reflecting back to her life and the day she died. Thus the theme is that although death is a scary thing, its a soothing process to enter the afterlife. The literary elements that contribute to the theme are personification, imagery, and extended metaphor.

Dickinson’s letter is to the world, which ignores her, tells of Nature’s message about her works, and asks the world to judge them kindly. However, since this most likely was not actually written for people to read, it is Emily’s own acceptance of her work, written only for herself. This emotional plea with herself helps the readers see her dedication and passion for her writing. This letter can also be seen as Dickinson’s acceptance of rejection, when a few of her poems were submitted for publishing, and denied. She was confident enough to know that her poetry was incredible, and that men involved in publishing were too closed minded to allow her work to be printed. Dickinson is creatively able to place two different meanings into one poem, depending on how the reader choices to perceive it. By intertwining the idea of nature into her poem, while refereeing to it as something else, her abstract meanings can be taken at different levels.

The language present in Emily Dickinson’s poetry is at times unclear, sometimes ungrammatical and can be found to be disjunctive. Dickinson wrote in distinct brevity, irregular grammar, peculiar punctuation and hand picked diction. Her poems were written in a circular manner, where she took the reader to one place and them swept them back to the beginning always relating one metaphor to the next. Dickinson was an intimate person throughout her life, and her poems reflect that lifestyle. Like her poems, she was never quite figured out. Dickinson wrote not for the audience to understand but for her own self

     Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American History, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice.

Dickinson begins by saying “I'll tell you how the sun rose”(1). This simple phrase may seem unimportant, but without it, the reader would not know the subject of the poem. She uses the element of rhyme to give the poem a sort of musical rhythm to it. This rhyming causes her to use some less common words to fit the rhyme scheme of her poem. She rhymes words such as “stile”(10) and “while”(12), and while using

If you couldn't tell already, the theme in this poem is death. Quite frankly, death is not a new concept to anyone, but Emily Dickinson does a wonderful job at making it fresh by having death literally take the form of a person. At first I pictured it looking like the grim reaper, with his black cloak and the curved sharp thing he always has in his hand, but I found that he's actually a smooth operator.

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense