Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Ahmad Grays

Ms. Kierath

English 1102

23 February 2017

Poetry Analysis Described by some as her best known poem, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” or “479” was written by Emily Dickinson in the early 1860’s. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830 and was described by locals as eccentric and reclusive. It is believed that she may have been suffering mentally from agoraphobia and/or anxiety and depression. It is also speculated that she may have been reclusive simply because she did not want to leave her sick mother’s side. Since Dickinson wrote poetry as an emotional outlet and did not intend to write for an audience, she titled only a few of her poems. This allowed scholars who would later study her to title the rest

However, she did have some tendencies when she wrote, one of which was writing in first person. She used the first person point of view but revealed later in her work that she was not the speaker in the poem. Another unusual thing about her structure is that rather than using periods and commas, she used dashes. While they are generally used to offset a word or phrase after an independent clause, Dickinson liked to use them throughout her poems. After studying her work, scholars believe that dashes signify pauses for more effective reading. Another writing tendency was capitalizing interior words, not just the ones that began her lines. Word choice clearly played a major role in her

In “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” she was able to personify the idea of death as though it were a civil gentleman that offered his passengers, one by one, a horse and carriage ride to their final resting place, passing things that would remind them of the life he/she lived. “We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess- in the Ring- We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain- We passed the Setting Sun” (lines 9-12). The images created by Dickinson lets the reader know that Death is taking his passenger to see things that would remind him/her of the life he/she lived. The children at recess represent the passenger’s adolescent years, the fields of grain they pass reminds the passenger of their working years, and the setting sun represents the passenger’s life coming to an end. With her precise use of words in stanza three, images of the different things that Death and his passenger passed on their trip were easily created. “... a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground- The Roof was scarcely visible- The Cornice- in the Ground” (17-20). The scene the passenger and death saw once they reached their final destination in stanza five is also vivid as she uses more specific words to describe it. Through her descriptive word choice, Dickinson gives readers vivid