Because I Could not Stop for Death: Literary Analysis
“Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality” by Emily Dickinson. From the title of this poem we can understand that life goes on and death cannot be stopped. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, she has become one of the greatest American poets. Emily Dickenson is known to have written at least 1,775 poems, only 7 were published before her death. She wrote about the nature, about the nature of immortality and death. Her sister, Lavinia, found all of her poems and published them into a book known as “The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Among these poems was “Because I could not stop for death.” She wrote this poem during the American Civil War, where death was an ever-present reality. Death is in from of a gentleman who takes her on a ride in a horse drawn carriage. They drive through the town at a relaxed pace passing by children playing, grain, and the sun which is setting. They stop at a grave and we find out the speaker had been dead the entire time. This is the poet showing that death is not the end rather it’s the beginning of a new life. The path to eternal life is one that has to go through death. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Because I could not stop for Death,” to show how formal elements create meaning within this poem. Throughout the poem, Emily Dickinson utilizes many different ways to express the speaker’s reflection on death with personifications, symbols and metaphors.
The first important literary element that is used is personification, because personification is attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things or abstractions. Emily Dickinson is giving death human traits. The whole poem personifies death a person. Death picks the narrator up and travels with her slowly taking her to her place. She personified death because death doesn’t stop to wait, and you don’t know when death comes. The way she describes death in lines 1 and 2 “Because I could not stop for death/ He kindly waited for me.” These two lines make you think of a gentleman pulling in a carriage. Death acts like a person, like how people are inevitably is waiting for death. The other example is shown in line five “We slowly drove- He knew no haste.” Death is like a gentleman that slowly gets to know a lady before he sweeps her off of her feet and takes her home with him. There was no rush to eternity, in this case her home would be eternity. “For his civility”, she compares death to its manners. Death is polite and courteous. Immortality is also a passenger on this ride foreshadowing eternity.
The other element is symbolism. Symbolism is used to help the readers understand meaning that she is trying to express. The speaker tells us that the sun has finally passed her by and left her in the cold when all she has on, is a gossamer, a tippet and a tulle, all of which are really thin. Also, “My Tippet / only tulle” is used both for bridal veils and funeral veils but in this poem, it suggests that objects are used to make shrouds. Another example of symbolism is used in line 18 “A swelling of the ground”, the area around the grave swells once the body is in the ground. The reader reminds that is actually grave. We can also see symbolism in lines 9,12,13. The details of these lines represent the stages of life. “We passed the school,” includes her childhood memories, as Dickinson compares death with the lives of young children. “We passed the Field of Grazing Grain,” represents the middle of her life, the working years. “We passed the setting sun,” as the sunset begins to get colder and darker is symbols death, last stage of her life. “ At Recess-in the ring,” the effect this line has is showing a reference to the popular children’s game “Ring Around the Rosie”, a rather morbid game where kids dance around singing a song until the end where they “all fall down”, symbolizing death.
Dickenson’s last element is metaphor. The poem as a whole is a metaphor. The speaker arrives at her destination: her grave, which is metaphorically resembled as a house. She is slowly taken to her death in a carriage and death is the driver. She compares what real death might be like to the journey that we take to our final resting place. In my interpretation home is like a grave because through our journey in life no matter where we go, our last stop is our home. In line 17 “We paused before a house,” shows that the house is the “final resting place.” This poem describes that house is the home of the death in other word a gravesite which is final destination. The speaker depicts the timeless nature of eternity. “They pause before the grave-swollen ground, glance at the tomb, and then go on. Go on and on, for centuries. Eternity, for Dickinson, is not a place at which one arrives. It is rather the journey-town, a continual evolving. That’s the radical importance of the last tittle preposition of the poem. If we are going “toward” eternity then we are clearly not “at” it, nor ever will be” (Shibboleth 14). It suggests that both death and life are journeys, but death’s journey is free of the busy, chaotic pace of life which we can see in line “Feels shorter than the Day.”
In conclusion, the theme of this poem it’s about death which is natural and there is no way to avoid it. The poem creates the sense that death is unavoidable. No person knows their exact time to die. Every person is on the track to death whether they know it or not. Usually death is portrayed as a cruel and painful experience, but Dickenson represents him as a kind figure. The words create a calm and fearless mood. A connection is the poem to Emily’s life. It seems that she wrote this poem before her death in real life. She expected her death anytime soon. She was calm and understanding just like she sounded in the poem. Emily Dickinson uses death as personification and she also includes many symbols and metaphors. “The only possible conclusion is that the persona should realize this, and therefore the poem ends when the situation is understood-when the lady surmises that the horses’ heads are towards eternity. The centuries following are shorter than the brief moment of realization” (John F.8). We aren’t always ready for death, but death is ready and waiting for us.
