EMILY DICKINSON Amber Shields

BIOGRAPHY  Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 to a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. In her youth she studied at Amherst Academy from She then spent a short stint at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family’s house a mere seven months later. It was then that she took up writing. Her mother fell ill in the mid-1850s and Emily made it her duty to stay home with her at all times. She spent the next forty years of her life in seclusion. It was during this time that she began her ‘lasting legacy,’ many carefully composed manuscripts that eventually contained almost 800 poems. Very few of her poems were published during her lifetime, and those that were published were altered to fit the standards of the time. It was not until her untimely death on May 15, 1886 that most of her poems were actually discovered by her younger sister Lavinia. The first collection of her poetry was published in 1890 by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd.

o Because I could not stop for Death, o He kindly stopped for me; o The carriage held but just ourselves o And Immortality. o We slowly drove, he knew no haste, o And I had put away o My labor, and my leisure too, o For his civility. o We passed the school where children played, o Their lessons scarcely done; o We passed the fields of gazing grain, o We passed the setting sun. BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH o Or rather, He passed Us; o The Dews drew quivering and chill, o For only Gossamer, my Gown, o My Tippet only Tulle. o We paused before a house that seemed o A swelling of the ground; o The roof was scarcely visible. o The cornice but a mound. o Since then 'tis centuries but each o Feels shorter than the day o I first surmised the horses' heads o Were toward eternity.

POEM ANALYSIS  Lyrical poem  Meter: alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter  Rhyme scheme: abcb  Personification of death and the sun  Anaphora of ‘we passed the’ in the third stanza  Theme: death  Speaker: a woman who speaks from the grave  Metaphor: We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground

LITERARY CRITICS  Margaret Dickie maintains that Dickinson’s poems were written as lyrics and should be examined as so, rather than as a whole.  Allen Tate observed that "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is an extraordinary poem, even saying that “it deserves to be regarded as one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail.”

VIDEO  because-i-could-not-stop-for-death_creation#