Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death

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as a person, in fact, as a kind man who drives a horse-drawn carriage. Also, death is described as someone who �knew no haste.� By describing Death in this way, Dickinson establishes a tone of calmness and friendliness, which is unusual because death is regularly viewed as dark and gloomy. In stanza two, the speaker states that �I had put away / My labor and my leisure too, / For His Civility.� This helps characterize Death as a figure of importance because the speaker had to stop everything she was doing and join �Death.� The tone gradually becomes suspenseful and foreboding as �Death� and the speaker �slowly drove� away. The imagery that Dickinson uses provides a setting for this poem. Collomar Ammetts comments that this poem is �being compared to a funeral procession and that they always proceed "slowly" and often majestically� (Collomar). When the narrator meets �Death�, �Death� takes the narrator on a carriage ride with just the two of them, and of course �Immortality.� ...

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