I have read all of the selected poems from Emily Dickinson and as I read them I noticed a common theme with all of them. I felt like in all of the poems I read I had this dark vibe while reading them. Most of the poem reoccurring theme was death and immortality. One other thing that I found interesting about Dickinson poems was that none on them had titles. I also find it strange that she will start a sentence with and capitalize words like “and” and also “because” conjunction words, but since she was an English Major, I felt she had some kind of reasoning behind this. Also another quality I picked up reading her poems was that I felt the made sense and at the same time did not make any sense. It was like you thought you comprehended, and on the next line you will get confused right away. I will go about analyzing the poem number 712.
In the first stanza, Emily Dickinson has made death and living thing (I know it sounds contradicting, I felt the same exact way). In the first couple of lines, “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me” She wrote the word Death with a capital D and it was not at the beginning of a sentence. Usually a word with be spelled with a capital letter in the middle of a sentence if it’s a special nouns. And also on the next line, she also substituted the word death with the pronoun word “he”. Both of these techniques I saw gave me the clue that she turned death into a person. Reading the first two line, she was basically saying that not matter how hard she tries, she would not be able to escape death. I drew this picture in my mind that death was like a cab driver and the speaker was waiting to get picked up by him. In line 1-4 “The Carriage held but just Ourselves – and Immortality.” Emily also made Immortality as another living thing as well. In this case I saw the Carriage as a train that had the speaker and also Immortality as another passenger on the train.
In the second stanza, She starts off with the line “We drove – He knew no haste.” What she was saying was that Death was taking her on a journey. The second half of the line can be interpreted in different ways. One way I have interpreted this line was saying that Death was always calm and collective. Then she goes about saying “And I had put away My Labor and my leisure too, For his Civility” the line gave me an imagery that Death was a tour guide and she everything she was doing she stop and gave him her undivided attention, like a classroom setting when the teacher is lecturing and the students put away their cellphones, homework assignments from other classes and etc.
Through out the rest of the poem, after reading it many times and also searching Google to back up my thinking, I realized that during the smooth journey the final destination was the poets grave. During all the other lines, she has described what she saw likewise lines 9-12 “we passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – we passed the Fields of gazing Grain” all this reminds me of my earlier reference to the poet being on the train and seeing out of the window like how little kids will do. This stanza started out positive, but then when she said, “We passed the Setting Sun.” I felt was the very thin line from light to darkness. Why I say that is even thought watching the sunset is a beautiful thing, it’s also the start to nighttime. Like wise the rest of the poem was darkness, or I should say the rest of her ride to the grave is getting dark.
When I read the poem for the first time it confused me because Dickinson would capitalize words randomly. After reading it for a second time it hit me, and I realized that Dickinson does this intentionally. I didn’t pick it up right away but I found that “Death” is capitalized because it is personified as a person almost like a grim reaper. I also got a dark vibe from the poem because it was a person that is experiencing his or her own death and also knows and feels whats going on in their funeral. While Dickinson mentions children and the sunset, the overall vibe of the poem is dark. I also picked up that “Death” doesn’t seem too horrible, and the person that has died is experiencing an incredibly smooth ride.
I like the poem “because I could not stop for Death,” because it describes death like a landscape painting. The term “death” usually has a dark or negative image. However, in this poem, Emily’s expression regarding Death sounds gentle because , as you mentioned in your blog, she describes it like what she sees. Of course, she uses several types of figure of speech for gentle expression. For instance, death is not only personified, but also is expressed as traveling with a carriage. I like, especially, the part “We passed the Setting Sun.” This sounds really like portraying landscape, and it is also a good transition phrase to change the atmosphere smoothly. Therefore, it seems a nice and gentle poem in my point of view.
When I read the poem for the first time it confused me because Dickinson would capitalize words randomly. After reading it for a second time it hit me, and I realized that Dickinson does this intentionally. I didn’t pick it up right away but I found that “Death” is capitalized because it is personified as a person almost like a grim reaper. I also got a dark vibe from the poem because it was a person that is experiencing his or her own death and also knows and feels whats going on in their funeral. While Dickinson mentions children and the sunset, the overall vibe of the poem is dark. I also picked up that “Death” doesn’t seem too horrible, and the person that has died is experiencing an incredibly smooth ride.
Emily Dickinson also structures the poem in a way that she uses different literary elements throughout the poem to setup a dark theme throughout the poem. Dickinson uses imagery, personification, and symbolism to set up these dark tones. She uses personification as said above because she give things like Death, human-like characteristics. Dickinson uses imagery because she talks about passing things like a school where children are playing, and she is also passing the sun which is setting. Both of those things are used to show something cheerful in a way, but by them passing it, this is showing that they are passing something that is cheerful to something that is dark and not as nicer. The last element she uses is symbolism, and she uses that by showing a grave in the ground, but Dickinson writes it in a way that it symbolizes a house because this person will be living there forever. So what I read and saw in this poem is that not only does Dickinson give things such as “Death” human like traits, she writes the poem in sections that use different literary elements to get a dark tone or mood across.