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Final Draft: Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “Because I could not Stop for Death”, captures the essence of transcending worlds and intrigues the reader with “dialectical wordplay and hidden significance”. Throughout the duration of the poem, she takes a ride with death through her life to her place of eternal rest and leaves everything behind to a new beginning in eternity. In her busy and fruitful life, she had not the time to stop, so death kindly paused to escort her, and she willingly went. Emily Dickinson portrayed death as a friendly gentlemen and her death as a pleasant ride in his carriage and combined it with a philosophical sense of time, and death, which is the heart of her poem, and the key to her successful capturing of the style of mysticism.
In the first stanza she tells of death as a gentle and kind host, and paints a picture of civility and graciousness. She puts her full trust in this new stranger, and seems to be at ease, actually in a literal sense, during the ride of her lifetime. She has a certain trust of the character know n as death due to his special politeness, taking time for her to drive slowly in remembrance. She conveys death to the reader as an entity, distinguished from the moment of death itself by characterizing it as ironically a tender, caring human. She personifies death and dramatizes the experience (Bloom 37). Some have noticed that “I”
is used more frequently in this poem than all of her others. It appears to the reader as biblical imagery pertaining to the quote, “the will to live in the face of death and the joy this will creates”(Bloom 37), therefore making her whole experience an earthen heaven. She is wary of puritanical didacticism and skeptical of Christianity, but divides herself from I in visions, ____, which becomes her poetry (Bloom 38). Emotional detachment allows levity in the inner construction and workings of the piece. She translates the meditative state through vagueness and somewhat confusing diction. Meter and rhyme are uncharacteristically balanced and uniform with even, iambic lines. (Bloom 38) Through the poem, she struggles to succeed in capturing the essence of mysticism; one of the most difficult styles to use. Logic of language has no place perceived by the reader in the poem (Bloom 71). She figures out the precise diction to use in each situation to make it seem surreal and fantastical. “Elliptical intensely compressed verses omitted conjunctions rhymes tossed aside agreement between nouns and verbs”, and her own action words when there was a need (Dunlap NP). Distant emotions and a sense of timelessness intertwine around each line and fill the reader with interest.
She combines two different aspects through the selection to attest to the speaker’s confused state. Inherent tension of dueling opposites courses through the heart of her work. “Nonlinear dream like progressions meld temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, [and life and death]” (Engle, NP) blended seamlessly together in Dickinson’s poem. Death receded into the background and his services and companionship are over at “we paused” in the opening of the fifth stanza, and concrete realism melds into “awe and circumference”. Passing by everything she becomes aware of the fullness of life. When she leaves death’s carriage and stands in the dewy chill, the sun sets, and she sees her life drawing to a close. A chill overtakes her, like a cold hand on her neck, reminding her she can’t linger too long. Death pauses to allow her to view “a swelling of the ground”, her grave and her new home. Standing there for a moment is seen as her asserting her place in the universe and recognizing that some piece of her soul lives on. In the last stanza, Dickinson tells of how nature is interconnected and everything seems to follow a set circular path. The last line conveys her opinion on life after death. She doesn’t cease to exist, she merely is “toward eternity”, which everyone can assume is never-ending.
The image at the burial room of a woman and her escort, death, is not one of despair nor loss, nor outrage, but of resignation. She had no time to stop before, and death granted her the power to pause for a moment to take in everything. With death’s help, she has finally accepted her passing life, and is ready to move on to somewhere that cannot be defined or known until reached. The wheel of life moves on after death and she’s moving once again “toward eternity”.
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Posted by RitsuchanOH on 2008-01-06 23:32:09 | Rating: | Views: 31
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