A child is born, a life is lost. You come into this world knowing one day you will die. You will not know when you will die and or how you will die however one day it will happen. In the poem, Because I CouldNot Stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson, she writes about death coming to get her while usingmetaphors,alliteration, and personification amongst other styles to get her idea across.
The first line of the poem starts off “Because I could not stop for Death (1) and it sets the idea of the poem from the start. When death is coming it cannot be stopped and throughout the poem she is getting closer to death but she does not fear it. She knows this is a natural process that is going to happen one day or another to any one person so instead of fearing it she is embracing it. Patrica Engle wrote “It is simply not her nature to stop for Death. She realizes that she cannot recognize Death's power over her.” Dickinson uses death as a metaphor to portray that death is feared yet she is so calm when it has come after her. “And I had put away/ My labor, and my leisure too, / For his civility” (6-8). As people we fear death and we wish it would not happen, but Dickinson is saying that she put aside her life, her work, her leisure because death came in such a kind way.
“We passed the school where children played” (9) symbolizes a life filled with life. The woman noticing the scenery around her as she is being led by death can mean either she was too busy caught up in her whole life and never noticed the simple pleasures of a child playing or the “fields of grazing grain” (11). The woman is too caught up in her daily life and work to realize that it is time for death. She has a date with death that happens to be very cordial. Dickinson uses personification to describe death giving “Death” the male role. “He kindly stopped for me” (2) informs us the reader that death is a male. In the poem death is portrayed as being a gentleman that is very courteous and cautious in coming after this woman. “We slowly drove, he knew no haste” (5). In this line, the reader can assume that they drove slowly because death has her already and the woman is already in the hearse which drives slowly followed by the funeral procession. Now that she is dead, she goes slowly opposite to when she was caught up in her daily life and not being able to enjoy the simple pleasures life had to offer her.
The poem consists of twenty lines in the form of six stanzas which have four lines, making the poem a quatrain. Starting with the first line there are eight syllables in the sentence and the second sentence has six syllables. Throughout the poem this pattern remains with eight syllables then six, eight, six. The tone of the poem has an eerie feeling which gives the reader an insight on death. We usually do not sit there and think of when death will come but after reading Dickinson’s poem, you paint the picture of death and imagine the scenery she is in while death carries her off toward eternity.
WORKS CITED
Engle, Patrica. "Dickinson's Because I could not stop for death." The Explicator 60.2 (2002): 72+. General OneFile. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.
I like your essay on Dickinson. You managed to capture the meaning behind the poem as I did in mine. I can tell you have a fond respect for the poem as well as Dickinson's work.
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