In Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” begins a story of a woman who embraces death and personifies it as a gentle man. She welcomes him into her after life, and then reflects on her own life through the windows of “Eternity” (p.575) while sensing that her life “Feels Shorter than a Day” (p.575). The main reason for these feelings is that at this point she is in eternity and she feels as if time is flying by. Her grammar is used very precisely and explicitly, in order to lead the reader to believe that there is more than what seems to be at hand. How her quatrains are broken up into a simple rhyme scheme allows the reader to see that she is not intentionally trying to rhyme but mistakenly follows through with a rhyme. She personifies death into a real person by providing it with human characteristics and mannerisms. She speaks of Death as if he were a gentleman coming to pick her up, “The Carriage held but just Ourselves- / And Immortality” (p.5
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The fields of grain refer to youth growing up to adulthood, and to conclude life at the end of adulthood the sun sets. She then states “Or rather-He passed Us-” (p. 575) the deceiving nature of death forces her to believe that she must put aside her life for the respect that he exudes, yet she does not realize, that it is he who takes her leisure and labor, and that it is not herself willingly putting it aside. She manipulates the reader from the beginning that she was being taken away to eternity yet she mentions that she first assumed she was going to eternity with Death, unlike her presumption she invoked on to the reader that she unknowingly was being taken to Eternity. She leaves in the long hyphens to show that life does not stop, it merely pauses, to allow greater in depth understanding of life and death.
At one point she claims that it was for his “Civility-” she then slowly begins to understand the gravity of her situation. She soon arrives to where they “pause before a House that seemed / A swelling of the Ground-” (p. Emily Dickinson goes on to compose a reference onto the natural cycle of life. 575) where she is to believe that this is her grave and here is where she will discard her physical body, and the commencement of where her essence goes on to eternity. Although she is unknowingly dead, she views Death as kind enough to bring the facilitating being of immortality, to comfort her on their journey. While we see that even in eternity life goes on. Up until this point everything she says is an observation of what she sees on her carriage ride.
Approximate Word count =
666
Approximate Pages =
3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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