Analysis Of "Because I Could Not Stop For Death"

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be seen as she writes, "We slowly drove-He knew no
haste." The third quatrain seems to speed up as the trinity of death,
immortality, and the speaker pass the children playing, the fields of grain,
and the setting sun one after another. The poem seems to get faster and
faster as life goes through its course. In lines 17 and 18, however, the
poem seems to slow down as Dickinson writes, "We paused before a House that
seemed / A Swelling of the Ground-." The reader is given a feeling of life
slowly ending. Another way in which Dickinson uses the form of the poem to
convey a message to the reader occurs on line four as she writes, "And
Immortality." Eunice Glenn believes that the word "Immortality" is given
a line by itself to show its importance (qtd. in Davis 107). Perhaps the
most notable way in which Dickinson uses form is when she ends the poem
with a dash. Judith Farr believes that the dash seems to indicate that the
poem is never ending, just as eternity is never ending ...

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first time perfect
rhyme is used is in lines 2 and 4 with the rhyming of the words "me" and
"immortality." The second, and last, time perfect rhyme is used is in
lines 18 and 20 as she repeats the word "ground." All in all,
Dickinson'suse of figurative language contributes to the meaning of the
poem.
Another literary element that Dickinson uses in her poem is tone,
which is used to help create the general mood of the poem. It is
interesting to note that her tone in regards to death contrasts with that
of her time period. Farr states that the people of Dickinson's era looked
at death as being "a skeletal marauder-thief with a scythe and a grimace"
(329). Society in the 1800s viewed ...

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