Because I would not…
How does Dickinson present death in her poem? Compare it to three others on the same theme.
The subject of death, including her own death, occurs throughout Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. Although it is a morbid fascination, death was around Emily Dickinson, so it was not unexpected for her to express her views on the subject. During her lifetime Emily lived for fifteen years near a two cemetery. Now this clearly would show why she was interested in the concept of death. But not only that, religious attention was focused on being prepared for death due to many people dying of illness and accidents, as in those days sanitation and peoples well-being was not an importance. We obviously can see that death is going to play a crucial part of this poem because she open her stanza by saying “Because I could not stop for death” this personifies “death”, as it infers that she knew that she was dyeing and there was nothing left that she could do. She knew that she would not get better and there was no way of stopping her death. This affects the audience because they feel as if that death is a person or some sort of monster. So by personifying death as if it’s coming to get her shows that she is afraid and that she could not stop it from coming. The purpose of death being a theme was so that she could express her feeling about what is truly happening and how she feels about her death. As we can see that she clearly believes that death is out to get her, implying that she must have done something wrong which is why she is not going to live. Because if she was a good person death would not want to get her in such a young age. Also due to the 1880’s being a very religious time, doing anything wrong was believed to be a sin in which God will punish one for being sinful.
Thus again she uses the theme of death to capture the way in which she patiently waits to greet death. Again personifying, Emily Dickinson starts another poem by saying “It was not death, for I stood up”. This implies that she was waiting for death to come but it was not death who she greeted. But implicitly meaning that she was shocked buy whom she was greeted by because she was expecting death to come, which is why she “stood up”. The poem then goes on to say “And all the Dead, lie down –“. This now shows us that death did come but not for her, death came for someone else. This could be someone close to her like her nephew Gib who died 3 years before she did in 1883 or other close friends who also died. We clearly can notice her use of capitalisation of “Dead” emphasise the shock because someone has died and it’s not her. Which now makes us the audience see that she believed that death was going to be knocking on her door in which she was going to die, but death went elsewhere and she stood up in shock of this news. The purpose again hear was to show that she was just waiting for herself to perish and did not think to have any other dreams but to die. This is very disturbing for some. But is something that she always had on her mind. From since she was young she had the image of death to anywhere, firstly from living near a cemetery and those having died from awful diseases in where she lived. Also religion played a massive part of this because she was taught that she was meant to die and that it should not be a scary thing if she had done good in this world. But we know that Emily Dickinson always questioned her faith, which is why she feels as if she is going to hell, so she is afraid of what will happen to her in the afterlife.
Another poem in which she uses death as being a person is “There’s a certain slant if light”. She talks about death at the end in which we finally realise that she is afraid of dying. In the last stanza she says “On the look of death” personifying as if death has a face and is looking at her. Implicitly meaning that death is looking at her and it wants to stay distantly away from her. However explicitly meaning