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POEMS: Because I Could Not Stop For Death |
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| Because I Could Not Stop For Death In Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Emily Dickinson paints a delicate portrait of death. In living her life, the departed paid no heed to death's call until her time to pass on arrived. The carriage spoken of is the hearse that slowly and serenely picked her up for her final voyage. Having no need to hurry and paying little heed to time, the hearse slowly navigated its way through time. Most likely the mood in the hearse was solemn out of respect for the deceased, so the manner would have been of utmost dignity. The hearse gently negotiated its way through the town, passing different scenes of everyday life that the dead had known. At last, the hearse came to stop in front of an earthen grave where the dirt was delicately shoveled out in a pile next to the hole. To the dead, the dirt had the image of a cornice, or roof, while the hole in the earth was its new home. The poem concludes that with the deceased reflecting back through the years of eternity to the day of death when the horse's destination was the eternal rest that death brought. In the poem, each quatrain features a different aspect of the deceased's life and journey towards eternal rest. The poem opens with the dead being introduced to the solemn ride of a hearse. Instead of possessing a fear of death, the deceased takes note of the polite manner in which the carriage takes its time and does not hurry off to the cemetery. As the ride proceeds, the slow pace in which the carriage moved displayed that the death carriage "…knew no haste" (line five) and that the deceased respected his patience by not moving or doing anything they would have liked to do. In the third stanza, the stages of life are revealed. The youth of the dead is correlated to "…the school where children played…" (lines eight and nine). As the funeral procession passed "…the fields of gazing grain" (line eleven), the years of work were relived. Finally, as they passed the setting sun, the elder years of the deceased's life were revisited. The final stanza calls for the reader to pause and recognize just how short life really is. The deceased encourages the reader to take advantage of the time living because death does not wait for life. The theme of this poem is one of the solemn realities of life and death. Dickinson encourages the reader to enjoy the time they have because death, though offering serenity and peace, flies by without any regard to time. |