"Because I Could Not Stop For Death" - Critical Analysis

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Emily Dickinson frequently explores death through her poetry, using her eponomous 'em' dashes to communicate the confusion created by an intelligent and exploratory approach to the afterlife in a mind indoctrinated in Puritan dogma.

        Death is initially presented in this poem as a very different character from its usual personification as a malign, scythe wielding spirit. Here, as the poem begins, he takes the form of a charming suitor who 'kindly' stops, and maintains his 'civility' throughout their journey. As we progress through the poem, however, the reader becomes increasingly suspicious that the apparently benevolent Death has not, in fact, got Dickinson's best intrests at heart. The fourth stanza marks the change in tone that reveals this; the onset of ominous 'chill' as the carriage passes into darkness highlights how unprepared Death has left her, providing no warning of what is to come. The nervous tone that the poem adopts in this stanza is created both by the breakdown of the previously iambic rythmn and the language of cold shivers that the poet uses; both of which emphasise the 'quivering' nervousness of the unprepared. Dickinson's physical lack of preparation for the afterlife in the poem, her donning of 'gossamer' and 'tulle' for a journey into the night, reflects her lack of spiritual certainty in the real world; something reflected in several of her poems. Despite an upbringing filled with 'much gesture from the pulpit', doubt, not absolute faith, is the subject of much of her work. She remains steadfast only in her belief that 'This World is not Conclusion', as while she is confident in the existence of something more, the nature of the afterlife 'baffles' her. This poem is also an exploration of an unusual view of death, as Dickinson inverts the normal  metaphor of Death as the end of a journey into Death as a journey's beginning. Life, in this poem, is extrodinarily transient, compressed into the third stanza where childhood, the ripening  'Grain' of middle age and the setting sun of old age's decline are ploughed through in four lines. The poet makes this already short liftime seem even less substantial by the anaphoric use of 'We passed', which increases the pace of the poem and gives the passage of time an inevitable feel.

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        Where the poem's journey of death concludes is unclear, but we do know that there is a pause, perhaps a terminal pause, at a house in the ground.  Dickinson's use of imagery here is ingenious, as the reader's initial confusion mimics the narrator's, until we too surmise that this abode, this 'swelling in the ground' is a grave, thought of only by the deceased as a 'house'. The repetition and ryhme of 'ground' at the end of two lines in this stanza gives it a pounding finality; suggesting perhaps that this, and not the expected 'Immortality', is to be Dickinson's ...

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