“Because I could not stop for Death”
Uploaded by felicia beth on Dec 05, 2005
“Because I could not stop for Death”
“Because I could not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson is a work of art which speaks of death through a woman's voice. Death itself is personified as a kind carriage driver, and shown as if forthcoming and appears to be in the figurative wisdom of a gentle, sympathetic man, who is arriving to take the speaker on her special expedition. This special journey takes her through various stages of life all the way to her eternal death. Dickinson’s representation of Death as being gentle reduces the fear of death. The voice of the poem visibly articulates Dickinson’s idea of death. Dickinson accomplishes to reveal an essential message to her readers within only six stanzas which include grammatical structure, metaphorical idiom and poetical patterns.
This poem has of six stanzas. Each stanza depicts a considerably dissimilar attitude of the speaker’s voice. Each has tone and rhythm; for example, the horses are galloping in the third stanza yet this change by the forth stanza when the speaker comes to a halt. The rhythm creates the sound of horses galloping on the ground.
The last word of line 1has the word Death while the first stanza ends with the word immortality and by the last stanza we see it ends with the word Eternity representing the speaker's certainty in living forever, even after death. The poem has no continuous verse yet the first and third line in every stanza has an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. The word Death appears only once, thus specifying that it will come nevertheless so why draw attention to it, but the word passed appears four times, specifically putting emphasis on the passing of each stage in life cautiously, i.e.: portraying diverse procedures within a human’s lifetime. The poet varies the tenses from past to present by the use of the word feels in the last stanza, putting a significant prominence on her thoughts of immortality and eternity. The word surmised suggests that the speaker imagines she will go to an eternal life after her death. In the last stanza there is no punctuation thus, denoting Dickinson’s belief in the hypothesis of eternal life after death?
The first stanza is the creation of Dickinson’s journey with the gentle...