Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

There is no way to know what came before the beginning of time because there was no time to measure it, and maybe that is why time is so essential in life, but what about death? Time is an important element within Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death—“ and “In this short Life that only lasts an hour” as it illustrates her experiences with both life and her imagined death. Dickinson’s use of meter, paradox, punctuation, and diction reimagines the measurability of time in life and death, suggesting that the ability to measure time translates into power and once that ability is taken away, powerlessness follows. In “Because I could not stop for Death—”, Dickinson uses paradox to describe the journey through the afterlife in

The first stanza is crucial to setting up this theory. The speaker “could not stop for Death—” (line 1), so Death stopped for her (line 2). The word ‘stop’ has a connotation of an immediate break in movement, or life’s progression. As Death stops for the speaker, her life has now ended and thus time fades away and she begins her endless journey towards Eternity. On their way, Death “knew no haste” (line 5) while the speaker left behind her “labor and [her] leisure too for His Civility” (line 7-8) which describes the two basic categories all of her time would fall into. Here we can see that time in life and death are measured differently, Death moving at his own pace while the speaker let’s go of all the time she had previously in order to please Death. After passing through the cycle of life in stanza three, the speaker makes a point to say “Or rather— He passed Us—” (line 13). This is another instance of Death being in control of the situation, suggesting one’s life does not move forward without Death ‘passing’ them first. The capitalization of “He” and “His” when referring to Death resembles the use of capitalization when referring to God in Christianity. Although Dickinson was very open about not wanting to be a Christian in her late teens (“Emily Dickinson.”), she would have been aware of this

The speaker bluntly states, “In this short Life that only lasts an hour/How much—how little—is within our power” (lines 1-2). Although the poem is very short, it says a lot about the little control the speaker believes we hold in the very short time spent on earth and when compared to Death’s omnipotent personification mentioned earlier, that powerlessness is only emphasized more. Within the second line, the dashes are used to interrupt the speaker mid-thought. Because the speaker starts by saying “How much” but then, almost correcting herself, interjects with “how little”, the speaker is stressing the fact that she is aware of the limited control she has in life. This awareness can also be seen in the fact that the poem is not written as a question, but as a statement. The speaker also does not specify her own life as being short, but as life in general being short, emphasizing the little time and power possessed by all. Another way Dickinson uses the structure of her poem to show the speaker’s powerlessness is in the meter. The first line is written in iambic pentameter, but the second line contains eleven syllables, resulting in a hanging unstressed syllable at the end of “pow-er”. Dickinson could have been consistent with the meter and