Analysis Of Because I Could Not Stop For Death By Emily Dickinson

A Journey with Death

In terms of literature and other art forms, death has been approached from a myriad of perspectives. Throughout the course of the life of the poet and writer, Emily Dickenson, she addressed death and mortality frequently. Her poem, Because I could not stop for Death, offers an alternative outlook to Dylan Thomas’s, Do not go gentle into that good night, Robert Frost’s, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and other well-known poems. In this poem, Dickenson detailed the journey of a woman who had passed on to the afterlife. Speaking from this woman’s perspective, Dickenson provided an account that opposed the general motifs often related to death and dying. To do so, she utilized several techniques to skillfully build
The acbc rhyme scheme used in the poem, with each second line matching up to the fourth: me-immortality, away-civility, chill-tulle, day-eternity, served to strengthen the rhythmic balance of the poem, and augment the readers image of a familiar, unthreatening story. Considering that, without exception, the poem consisted of six quatrains, six four line stanzas, and a mixture of full and slant rhymes, the poem’s melodic and consistent nature is clear. By keeping to the same pattern of rhythm and stanza length, Dickenson solidified her message; the journey of the speaker was gradual and deliberate. On a smaller inter-stanza level, through use of alliteration and parallelism, the steady, regular pace and tone of the poem is reinforced. Particularly in the second half of the poem, following the stanza the focused on school life, this consistency became visible and use of parallelism and alliteration rose. For example, in the third stanza, “We passed the School, where Children
The initial line of the poem, “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me,” serves as an undeniable example of this. The idea of stopping for death, is not one that is commonly presented. For the most part, writings are full of a, death must be fought, could only take him in his sleep, stops for nothing theme. In Dickenson’s poem, she chose to provide an alternative perspective – one that suggests that, instead of the steamrolling, all-devouring, menacing Grim Reaper, Death has been drawn up as, Death is in fact much more multi-layered. Then, in the third stanza, immediately following the creation of one pattern, with, “We passed,” repeated, she broke this pattern, stating, “We passed the Setting Sun – Or Rather – He passed us –.” It is commonly understood that the sun cannot be passed, as it is millions of miles away, and in fact it generally appears to follow one as they travel. Dickenson called to mind the setting of the sun and the loss of light in a way that caused the reader to think, and broke her own newly created rhythm. Lastly, in the final stanza, the line, “Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day –,” explains the emotional process the speaker went through as she died and as she existed in an endless afterlife following her death. The speaker’s