emily Dickinson and Imagery

             Emily Dickinson's poems "Because I Could Not Stop for Death", "I Heard A Fly Buzz-When I Died", "After a Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes", and "I Felt A Funeral In My Brain" all have comparable imagery regarding one of life's few certainties, death. Dickinson's intense curiosity about mortality was present in much of her work and was her legacy as a poet.
             "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is one of Emily Dickinson's most discussed and famous poems because of its ambiguous, and unique view on the subject of death. Death in this poem is told as a woman's last trip, she is headed toward eternity. This poem helped to characterize and bring death down to a more personal level. " Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me (Meyer 754)", Dickinson made death seem passive and easy with this imagery. She suggested that death is natural and unstoppable for everybody, but also gave comfort that it is not the end of a soul's journey. The precise form that Dickinson used throughout the poem helped convey her message to the reader. The poem was written in five quatrains. The way in which each stanza was written gave the poem unity and made it easy to read. In "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" the reader obtains a feeling of forward movement throughout the second and third quatrain. For example, in line 5, Dickinson began death's journey with a slow, forward movement, which could be seen in the verse, "We slowly drove-He knew no haste." The third quatrain seemed to speed up as the speaker passed the children playing, the fields of grain, and the setting sun one after another. It appeared to get faster as life continued through its course. In lines 17 and 18, however, the poem slowed down as Dickinson writes, "We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground." The reader was given a feeling of life slowly ending. Another way in which Dickinson used the form of the poem to con...

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emily Dickinson and Imagery. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 11:07, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/19692.html