Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

1000 Words2 Pages

Death is a natural but emotionally painful occurrence. While it may be difficult to deal with, death is not exactly ‘the end.’ Instead, it is the beginning of the rest of eternity. Through death, the most freeing experiences can be achieved. Death is not a discontinuation of life, but rather an extension of it. Death is sometimes seen from an alternate angle, as a way to free oneself from the shackles of conformity and lack of excitement. At the end of one’s life, one may come to realize they had never truly found oneself. This realization can evoke the idea that death can extend one’s ability to achieve more, and find who they truly are. One reason that may prevent one from reaching full potential is allowing mourning to rule one’s mind and life. Mourning is the way people naturally deal with …show more content…

In this piece, the narrator shows that death is not always such a negative thing. In the poem, the narrator states, “because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me” (Dickinson). In this statement, it is implied that ‘Death’, in a personified form, is a gentleman of sorts. This brings forth the notion that death does not take lives for singularly selfish or negative purposes. Death’s stopping for the narrator shows that death is kind and considerate of the deceased. The second stanza proves this, as the author says, “We slowly drove – He knew no haste, And I had put away, My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility” (Dickinson). The aforementioned stanza also relates to the fact that the narrator was busy, and so death stopped so that the narrator could be better prepared for death. This shows how the process of death is often slow, and one sometimes has a forewarning that death may be imminent. While it is not always an advanced forewarning, if one looks at the occurrence in hindsight, oftentimes one would see that there were hints at the fact that the deceased was nearing

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