I Could Not Stop For Death Essay

, Research Paper

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830. Resembling her poetry, her relationship to the world was restrained. She has spend her entire life at home, never married, and developed a particular attention for death. Through her poetry, the reader found a particular concern for death. Because I Could Not Stop for Death, published in 1863, is one of Emily s poetry that discuss the departure of human beings to the other world. Through a deep lecture, the reader will discover wealthy meanings hidden in the tone, the style, and the different uses of the words. In this poem, Emily realizes that escaping from death is futile and the fair of death is baseless. She realized but made also the reader share it. The analyses that follow will help the poem-lover try to define and understand the different meaning of death.

At the beginning of the poem, death is personified in terms of human characteristics. In fact, the fair developed by individual toward this mystical character has always been justified. Death took, through all cultures and religions, the forms of a skeleton, an old man who is repulsing, never welcome, and always feared. In this poem, Emily uses the personification of Death as a metaphor to make her reader accept the faired character. Here, Death is a gentleman, maybe good looking. The woman seems comfortable with him. She is not scared. The lady has kept herself too busy to remember death because I could not stop for death, but, he Kindly came by to take her. The poem reader didn t assist to any confrontation between Death and his prey, while most people will try to escape him she meet him with all the happiness to find someone that gentle. The use of Carriage as their way of transportation, the carriage held but just ourselves, and the presence of this gentleman lead to a Romanesque walking. We assist to another personification of death with the use of ourselves, accentuated with the use of immortality.

On the other hand, the use of time presents an aspect of eternity accentuating the idea of death. We slowly drove recognize that death has no thought of time. Time and space are a concept concerning humans. The time adds up as a factor that established when everything ends, when death arrives, it is a reference for us, a reference associated to the arrival of death. Death is here now so all the meanings relating to the time are mean less. Also, in the rime He passed us , the accentuation of time appears again as they were moving so slowly that they might appear to some reader as static. The reference to the woman s clothing suggests that she is cold which is another reference to her dead.

Finally, the imagery, present in this ode, creates a retrospective of all human life by retracing the 3 steps of human s life, childhood, maturity, and finally the old age. Meaningful similitude through those 3 sentences where the retrospective of all the narrator s life is viewed through those three stages, We passed the school, were children strove/ At recess- in the ring-/ We passed the field of Gazing Grain-/ We passed the setting sun-. The effect of eternity given by the ring where children were playing shows that their travel will be eternal, the grain represents the natural world, the living world. Finally the setting sun , the sun determine human time, by the sentence that precedes the author means morning, afternoon, and night. As they passed they seems to be in another world where, sun, time , doesn t rule anymore.

Because I could not stop death, offers a new interpretation of death. The author, through metaphors, personification concerning death, educates the reader and helps him discover a new and attracting aspect of death. From a faired character, we grown up to notice that death is not that horrifying, in the opposite, it s a gentle character that appears more a lover than a tyrant. Death is the new beginning.