Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death” carries a constant theme of death throughout the story. The narrator seems to be describing her peaceful journey to death. Although, she does not feel ready to die, death had other plans and determined her time had come, so he stops for her. In the first stanza, she personifies death as a carriage driver, in the third line of this stanza Dickinson writes, “The Carriage held by just Ourselves / And Immortality.”

She is sharing the ride with death, but also immortality. In this stanza the writer hints that death and immorality go hand in hand; death is a necessary part to becoming immortal. In the second stanza, she tells us about death’s courtly manners, which eventually cause her to give into his charm and leave her life behind to ride with him. The third stanza is a collection of her childhood memories as they pass through a school and fields of gazing grain. By the last line of this stanza, the woman and her company have passed the setting sun, journeying toward the nighttime, which helps transitions into the much darker last two stanzas. In the fourth stanza, they seem to have stopped at a house, which I believe is her gravesite. Her description of the grave as her house tells us how comfortable she has become with her nearing death. With the sun setting, it becomes damp and cold “The Dews drew quivering and chill.” By the last stanza it seems as if death has creeped up on her, she has been dead for centuries but the time that has passed feels shorter than the day she died. She ends the poem on a positive note, “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity.” In other words, she had a feeling that the carriage would taker somewhere farther than to her grave, and it did, it took her to immortality.

I believe that the overall argument of the poem is that death is not to be feared, its part of the cycle. Throughout the poem, Dickinson attempts to explain