Matt Conneely

AP Literature
Poetry Explication
6 Match 2017

Explication of Because i could not stop for death

Death stops for everyone whether you're ready for it or not. The speaker of Emily
Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death narrates the poem from beyond the grave.
The audience is a general audience. The occasion is someone has died and their trying to give
their insight into life after death. The purpose of the poem is instructive.

A major literary device used in this poem is personification, more specifically

personification of death. The speaker suggests she was too busy for death, so death stopped for
her. Here Dickinson is personifying death with kindness, and because of deaths kindness of
stopping for her, she gives up on those things that kept her so busy. This is situational irony
because the general idea of death is not kind. She does this illustrate the idea that death is not
that scary, and that it is just another part of life. She then speaks on how deaths carriage only
holds them two, and it is this individual attention that leads her to give up her life so easily.

Another major literary device used in this poem is imagery. In the third stanza the
speaker gives reminders of the outside world, such as kids playing and fields of gazing grain, and
this is an example of the hard labors of life, this also represents the noticeable routine that the
world is in, and that she is no longer part of this routine. The next stanza portrays the harsh
reality of death, saying the dews drew quivering and the chill. This is where the ideal of death
sets in, and it is far more sinister. The poem says, we paused before a house that seemed a
swelling of the ground-the roof was scarcely visible-the cornice-in the ground-. This house
that is talked about is meant to represent the grave she will rest in.

The third major literary device used in this poem is imagery. Imagery is used from start
to end in this poem and for good reason. Dickinson uses imagery to illustrate the beautiful
scenery of the world for example, we passed the fields of gazing grain-we passed the setting
sun. Dickinson also uses imagery to illustrate the transition from the real world to the sinister
reality of death for example, the dews drew quivering and chill-. Dickinson also uses imagery
to describe the grave the speaker will rest in, for example, we paused before a house that
seemed- a swelling of the ground- the roof was scarcely visible- the cornice-in the ground-.