Nooman Muhammad
Vollmer
AP Literature B1
10/31/2014
Close Reading of Because I Could Not Stop for Death This poem by Emily Dickinson shows a woman, who is being escorted by “Death” and accompanied by “Immortality”. They are headed toward the speaker’s final destination, eternity. The speaker states that one should not be afraid of Death. Throughout the whole poem, the speaker comments about death kindly. “He kindly stopped for me”, “Enchanted by his kindness” are some examples. Again, throughout the poem death is personified as a gentleman. The personification makes the poem much easier to understand, then to understand death as intangible thing. The speaker also uses well described diction to present all phases of the speaker’s life. The childhood: “We passed the School, where Children strove”, the adulthood: “We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain”, and the “setting sun” which symbolized the end of the Speaker’s life. The speaker is also making good use of specific and concrete diction –of which we can visualize or picture matters such as childhood or adulthood. In the fourth stanza, the speaker realized that the grave was not her final destination. This is true because the speaker says that Death could have stopped at any time, but he did not choose to. Another example is when the speaker says “They passed her grave “ a house”. This shows that the grave was only temporary. The final destination was yet to come. In the final stages of the poem, the speaker dramatizes