Saturday, August 27, 2016

What separates "Because I Could Not Stop for Death—" from Dickinson's other poems?

As can be seen in her other poems exploring death and dying—e. g., "I heard a Fly buzz"—Dickinson rarely speculates on life after death. "Because I could not stop for Death—" is unique in her canon in that a kind of afterlife appears as a journey of centuries, but as she does in other death-related poems, Dickinson gets to the point of death but does not take a step farther. In "Because I could not stop for Death—" we see Dickinson use familiar conventions (a carriage ride, a social meeting with a kind stranger) and familiar settings (a schoolyard, fields of grain) to pave the way to a territory unfamiliar to us all: death. Though Dickinson offers vivid descriptions of life, the journey ends short of offering any further resolution. The influence of the Transcendentalists—and her own view of God and Nature—may have made a conventional conception of life after death impossible for Dickinson to articulate.

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