Because i could not stop for death&quot Essay

Emily Dickinson frequently explores death through her poetry, using her eponomous ’em’ dashes to communicate the confusion created by an intelligent and exploratory approach to the afterlife in a mind indoctrinated in Puritan dogma. Death is initially presented in this poem as a very different character from its usual personification as a malign, scythe wielding spirit. Here, as the poem begins, he takes the form of a charming suitor who ‘kindly’ stops, and maintains his ‘civility’ throughout their journey. As we progress through the poem, however, the reader becomes increasingly suspicious that the apparently benevolent Death has not, in fact, got Dickinson’s best intrests at heart. The fourth stanza marks the change in tone that reveals this; the onset of ominous ‘chill’ as the carriage passes into darkness highlights how unprepared Death has left her, providing no warning of what is to come. The nervous tone that the poem adopts in this stanza is created both by the breakdown of the previously iambic rythmn and the language of cold shivers that the poet uses; both of which emphasise the ‘quivering’ nervousness of the unprepared. Dickinson’s physical lack of preparation for the afterlife in the poem, her donning of ‘gossamer’ and ‘tulle’ for a journey into the night, reflects her lack of spiritual certainty in the real world; something reflected in several of her poems. Despite an upbringing filled with ‘much gesture from the pulpit’, doubt, not absolute faith, is the subject of much of her work. She remains steadfast only in her belief that ‘This World is not Conclusion’, as while she is confident in the existence of something more, the nature of the afterlife ‘baffles’ her. This poem is also an exploration of an unusual view of death, as Dickinson inverts the normal metaphor of Death as the end of a journey into Death as a journey’s beginning. Life, in this poem, is extrodinarily transient, compressed into the third stanza where childhood, the ripening ‘Grain’ of middle age and the setting sun of old age’s decline are ploughed through in four lines. The poet makes this already short liftime seem even less substantial by the anaphoric use of ‘We passed’, which increases the pace of the poem and gives the passage of time an inevitable feel. Where the poem’s journey of death concludes is unclear, but we do know that there is a pause, perhaps a terminal pause, at a house in the ground. Dickinson’s use of imagery here is ingenious, as the reader’s initial confusion mimics the narrator’s, until we too surmise that this abode, this ‘swelling in the ground’ is a grave, thought of only by the deceased as a ‘house’. The repetition and ryhme of ‘ground’ at the end of two lines in this stanza gives it a pounding finality; suggesting perhaps that this, and not the expected ‘Immortality’, is to be Dickinson’s final resting place. This unexpected turn causes the confusion that the image of the house parallels, and explains the last stanza, in which Dickinson’s fear of perpetual existence in a grave has centuries feeling ‘shorter than the day / I first surmised the Horse’s Heads / Were toward Eternity’. The poem is, in fact, unclear, but I would suggest that the grave is to be Dickinson’s final resting place; that the carriage ‘paused’ not because it intended to go on but instead because the narrator has not yet realised her fate. The final dash of the poem, therefore, represents not continuing doubt as it does in ‘This World is not Conclusion. ‘ but serves to remind the reader of the unending nature of Dickinson’s internment. In light of this, the first stanza’s ‘Immortality’ may seem out of place, but its rhyme with ‘me’ perhaps reveals its origins, as the narrator is consequently so strongly linked with it’s presence that we may imagine it is only Dickinson, and not Death, that welcomes immortality to the carriage, and that it is, in fact, only there as a result of her preconceptions. ‘Because I could not stop for Death –’ is perhaps, as a result, quite a cynical poem, making no promises of salvation or a Christian heaven. It, in some senses, continues a trend set by ‘This world is not Conlcusion. ‘ and ‘Behind me – dips Eternity –’; a trend of diminishing confidence: Dickinson’s once absolute faith in a world beyond our own develops into a confused fear at the nature of the afterlife; it may be a ‘Maelstrom in the sky’, surrounded by ‘Midnight’, or perhaps just a house in the ground. All this confusion is the product of Dickinson’s upbringing; ‘the Tooth that nibbles at the soul’ is a doubt that was to Puritans damning, and once she admits to herself its existence her future is uncertain and heaven perhaps inachievable. Despite it’s bleak outlook however, the poem still stands a facinating exploration of the nature of the next world.