Analysis Of "Because I Could Not Stop For Death"

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be
seen as she writes, "We slowly drove-He knew no haste." The third quatrain
seems to speed up as the trinity of death, immortality, and the speaker pass the
children playing, the fields of grain, and the setting sun one after another.
The poem seems to get faster and faster as life goes through its course. In
lines 17 and 18, however, the poem seems to slow down as Dickinson writes, "We
paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground-." The reader is
given a feeling of life slowly ending. Another way in which Dickinson uses the
form of the poem to convey a message to the reader occurs on line four as she
writes, "And Immortality." Eunice Glenn believes that the word "Immortality"
is given a line by itself to show its importance (qtd. in Davis 107). Perhaps
the most notable way in which Dickinson uses form is when she ends the poem with
a dash. Judith Farr believes that the dash seems to indicate that the poem is
never ending, just as eternity is never ending ...

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first time perfect rhyme is used is in lines 2 and 4 with the
rhyming of the words "me" and "immortality." The second, and last, time perfect
rhyme is used is in lines 18 and 20 as she repeats the word "ground." All in
all, Dickinson'suse of figurative language contributes to the meaning of the
poem.
Another literary element that Dickinson uses in her poem is tone, which
is used to help create the general mood of the poem. It is interesting to note
that her tone in regards to death contrasts with that of her time period. Farr
states that the people of Dickinson's era looked at death as being "a skeletal
marauder-thief with a scythe and a grimace" (329). Society in the 1800s ...

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