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Analysing 'Because I could not stop for Death'
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Analysing 'Because I could not stop for Death' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘Because I could not stop for Death -’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents attitudes and feelings about death in ‘Because I could not stop
for Death -’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
In this poem, A ghostly ‘I’ recalls death as a carriage ride into eternity that begins gently but
progresses to an icy shudder before leaving behind the richness of earthly life for an empty,
bodiless existence outside time. Dickinson once agains combines the teachings of the devout
Calvinist community around her in 19th century Amherst with her own personal misgivings,
producing a mix of certainty and doubt that is characteristic of her work.
Dickinson uses the first line as a surprising and confusing way to establish the central action the
poem. The dynamic verb in ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ creates a metaphor in which the
speaker’s life is represented by motion. The modal ‘could not’ implies that her death is within her
power, that she kept living because she was too busy to die. In these ways, the first line subverts
conventional notions of the inevitability of death. The second line, however, restores them
emphatically in ‘He kindly stopped for me’, the speaker shifts herself from subject to object of the
same verb, suggesting that her busy-ness was in vain. In dying, she describes the speaker as a victim
of something beyond her control. The pronoun ‘He’ confirms the personification of Death, using the
gender-specific reference to invest it with the male power of the nineteenth-century patriarchy
around Dickinson, and at the same time alluding to the traditional figure of the Grim Reaper. The
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