Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's Four Stages Of Death

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Through countless deaths and years of self reclusion, Emily Dickinson’s poems reflected her experience with death and its progression in ones life. Not only did Dickinson’s work reflect ones experience with death, but four specific pieces of work written by her reveal four stages of death that manifest themselves in a dying person’s life. “Hope Is The Thing With Feathers,” “This Consciousness That is Aware,” “I Heard a Fly buzz - when I died,” and “Because I could not stop for Death,” are the four works by Dickinson that exist to piece together the stages of death a person experiences when they are close to the end. Though death might be an enigma, Dickinson is able to seamlessly transition her thoughts on a subject through multiple different …show more content…

In “Because I could not stop for Death” the afterlife is coming in view for the dead, but sweet temptations and illusions await for naive souls. “The carriage held but Ourselves And Immortality” is the temptation of death that radiates from his mysterious ride(line 3-4). The illusion that immortality is sweeter than any experience that could be provided on earth is so tempting that it is no surprise death uses it to taunt people into his carriage. In, “And I had put away My labor and my leisure too,” Dickinson is able to show that in death work and play stop (line 5). There are no time constraints, no pressures of work, but then there is no time for pleasure either. Death allows no activity of any sort, the only thing a person has to do is to reminisce about the past and what could have been the future. “[A]nd Yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised”: life in death has no time constraints (line 21). Hours are seconds, but days could be years. It all is based on ones own experience in death. The last stage of death lasts forever, but it is not near as dreadful as foretold in stage two. Like life, afterlife is what a person makes of it; thinking of what one did wrong will not change anything, but thinking of the sweetest moments in life can make one think the afterlife is actually

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