When I read this poem, it makes me feel a cold. Blue and grey is the basic color of the poem since the poem is about Emily Dickinson’s understanding of death and his life. The first line of the poem: “Because I could not stop for Death”. It seems that Dickinson considers death is a very common and regular issue for him. She is not afraid of it. Emily Dickinson describes that she has to give up many things in her life for His Civility. It makes her not so happy about it because she has to give up her labor and leisure. She also talks about the life and time, such as school life, that everyone is passing from. It helps me to remember my school life when I was a child. “Or rather-He passed Us –“Dickinson is not moving and standing there. She is just looking at the changeable world.
In the later lines she talks about death again. “A Swelling of the Ground” I think she refers to a grave. However, Dickinson did not consider death is the end of the life. “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity.” Just like Emily Dickinson’s spiritual life, her poems are immortal. It seems like that Dickinson transcends her life and death.
Emily Dickinson had a great imagination. When I read her poems, I would have a dramatic and unexpected series of images in my mind. This makes me feel surprised. She liked to use rhymes and personification. She also liked to use dashes, but I cannot understand why she used these dashes. In her poem “712”, “Death” is personified because I feel that “Death” becomes a horseman. He takes her and drives slowly through her life which has been taken away, through sunset, to her new “House”— her grave. When she lives in her new house, time passes faster, and she becomes Eternity. Emily Dickinson seemed very calm when she faced death. She used the words “kindly” and “Civility” and made Death became a polite gentleman.
After I first read this poem I kept getting a picture of a hitchhiker and someone stopping to give them a ride. In this case death pulled over to give her the ride to where she was headed, which the last poster made a little more sense for me, her grave. Its almost as if she was headed for death but it was just a matter of time before she arrived.
I really love the first sentense of the poam that “Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me-.” Yes, the final of us is death, we could not do anything to change it or stop it happening. However, Emily Dickinson thought Death stopped for her. I think she did not mean death stops for her. Because she thought she could learn many things in her life, that she believes death walks slowly toward her.