Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”

The poem “Because I could not stop for Death”by Emily Dickinson is an amazing masterwork that drills the mind between two aspects the known and the unknown. The poem plays a major role in expressing the thoughts of the speaker regarding death. The main focus of the poem is life after death. Its context reflects the conditions by which death appears, death is made to appear as sympathetic and kind. The promise of immortality facilitates in removing fear and as such death does not only become acceptable, but it is also welcome.

As human beings, there is no one time that we feel that death came in the most suitable or appropriate time. When the author says that ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ she makes the audience question the reason she was unable to stop. The most apparent response is that she was enclosed in her life that she never thought of death. She is so precise on the fact that death is inevitable when she says that ‘He kindly stopped for me’.

 In this poem what began in simple past concluded in Eternity, life without an end where time presents no outcomes. Mortality faces Eternity. As the reader reads through the poem its focus seems like the last day of the speaker on earth. Nonetheless, in the end, we are told that all this took place hundreds of years ago but in the supernatural environment, it does not seem like even a day. The use of the term surmised implies that the speaker instinctively that the horses were heading for eternity even though without proof. 

Conclusively, the poem even though with a strange haunting power was one of the writer’s enjoyable poems. For once I felt a funeral in my brain.

Work Cited

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for death.”The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960).