Emily Dickinson Personification

According to popular belief, Emily Dickinson is known mostly for being a recluse in the nineteenth century who wrote poems obsessing over death. And while Dickinson did indeed have a fascination with death, it was not in the way as popular belief depicts. Being a woman of the nineteenth century, death was an almost daily part of Dickinson’s life, especially considering the fact that her bedroom overlooked a cemetery, but through her poetry, she had found a way to write about death in a variety of ways. In this particular poem, she writes with a calm and peaceful tone, using personification as a main tool throughout. Instead of using the typical depiction of death being depicted as a dark, threatening grim reaper-like creature, Dickinson personifies
The first and third lines in every stanza are iambic tetrameter, containing four feet. However, every second and fourth line has fewer syllables, making them contain only three feet and making them iambic trimeter. But even though they are different meters, they still have the same iambic metrical pattern. The rhyming itself does not follow a specific pattern, but it is scattered unevenly throughout the poem to tie everything together, such as having “Me” and “Immortality” in the first stanza, and “Civility” and “Eternity” in the last stanza. And not only do the scattered rhymes tie the sounds together, they bring attention to the words, “Immortality” and “Eternity,” which are major key terms in the poem’s theme. Another technique that Dickinson used to tie the poem together, as well as helping it progress, was the use of anaphora when she repeats the phrase, “We passed” three times in the third stanza, and in the fifth stanza but changed a bit to “We paused.” She also has a tendency to capitalize nouns in order to make them grab the reader’s attention and consider the words’ importance. The use of her dashes guides the reader throughout the poem, helping to pause or steer to the next