In this poem, ‘Because I could not stop for death’, Emily Dickinson showcases her rebellion against the conventional perception of the afterlife, and the values upheld by society in that age’. The use of imagery is very strong in this poem as the poet uses images of the past as she remembers them and forms a picture of connectedness between reality and imagination, the known and the unknown. As will be discussed in this paper, she views this relationship through hierarchically including the stages of life, even death and eternity. This way, she brilliantly forms a relationship between the finite and the infinite.
As far as the rhythm and structure of the poem are concerned, it contains six quatrains, and does not follow any consistent rhyme scheme. Every line starts with a strong beat but tapers off with a weak beat. The first and third lines in each stanza have iambic tetrameter, but the second and fourth lines are void of any consistent meter. The feet generate a rhythm the following way.
In the first stanza, Dickinson personifies Death
and Immortality. There is a hint of irony in this
stanza. She says that because she is so too busy,
she doesn’t stop for death, but death forcibly
makes her stop. As it does so, however, it kills
her and this depicts the unpredictable nature
of life. The iambic rhythm creates a setting of
trotting horses drawing the carriage.
Then, the poet speaks of specific stages of her life on earth, drawing upon her past. She views these happenings from a higher level of awareness, literally and figuratively. As an example of the former, as the carriage climbs higher, as if towards a heavenly destination, the poet refers to a house as “A Swelling of the Ground”. On the figurative side, the poem manages to symbolize the three stages of life: the phrase “School, where Children strove” could be interpreted as referring to childhood; “Fields of Gazing Grain” could be referring to the attainment of maturity; and lastly, “Setting Sun” to old age. Hence, there is a clear progression of the stages of life, from life to death and continuing to eternity. As the poet is looking at all events through an eternal looking glass, she says that life, like the “Horses Heads”, leads “toward Eternity”.
The rhythm denoting the trotting horses changes in the fourth stanza, perhaps signifying that the woman in the carriage is no longer moving. It could be interpreted from this that death is not a continuing journey into something else; it comes to an abrupt end even while one is still aware of it.
There is distinct lack of punctuation in the last stanza. This denotes breathlessness and panic as the subject of the poem wakes up to the realization that she has reached a permanent state of eternity, and that this stage would last a long time unlike the other stages in her life – this would last forever. This is how Emily Dickinson managed to depict her version of eternity after death, which was a stark contradiction to the values that society believed in at that time (Miller, 1968). |