Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Final Poetry Essay: Emily Dickinson “Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me-…” (Dickinson 1-2). Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, MA, and lived a fairly normal childhood. She attended an all-female college in her birth town, but her life changed after her cousin passed away. After that tragic event she developed, a rare mental condition that made her stay inside, and not go outside at all. It eventually got so bad that she would not even leave her bedroom. Dickinson wrote letters to all of her friends and family since she did not exit her room. She had a unique obsession with death, and this can be shown in her poems, specifically the poem “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”. This poem used many unique ways of writing such as her capitalization and punctuation in her poems, her use of slant rhymes, and also her use of personification on different, seemingly unimportant words to convey her obsession with death in her poem “Because I Could Not Stop For Death.” Dickinson used many hyphens to help further advance her poems. She explored and wrote about her feelings, and her pain. She did not shape her views, instead, her poems were free thoughts. In her poem, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”, Dickinson uses the
To us the words she capitalized are random, but most likely to her they meant something. An example of her using capitalization to personify a word can be shown when she writes “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me” (Dickinson 1-2). Dickinson personifies the word “Death” showing that in this poem that death is an actual person, we also know this because “Death” is followed by the word “He”. Another example of personification can also be shown when Dickinson writes “At Recess – in the Ring” (Dickinson 10). This personification shows that this meant something to Dickinson’s