Because_I_Could_Not_Stop_for_Death

Because I Could Not Stop for Death In Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” she uses various types of figurative language and imagery (personification, metaphor, and symbol) to portray the idea that death is not a dreadful event, but actually a pleasant experience. Emily Dickinson uses personification, giving human like qualities to an object or idea. In this poem, death is seen as a gentleman caller. Death is coming to pick her up for a date in a carriage. “He kindly stopped for me-“ is ironic because it shows she would rather not go, but since he is a kind, polite man she will go. A metaphor “transfers the sense of one word to another” (Barton/Hudson 99). Dickinson relates a house to a grave: We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground- The Roof was scarcely visible- The Cornice-in the Ground- The “Swelling of the Ground” is her new house, her grave. “The Roof” is the new dirt that was dug up and relocated on top of her, and “the Cornice” is the new tombstone molded into the ground. Symbolism is the use of “an image intended both to stand on its own right and attract meanings to death, could, not, stop, dickinson, emily, grain, passed, gazing, life, idea, sun, speaker, sense, personification, people, new, image, house, fields, because, trying, temperature, symbol, swelling, stanza, setting, school, roof, poem, one, metaphor, long, fun, feels, experience, eternal, emily, describes, body, before, actually, across, youth, writes, word, whole, welcome, warmth, visualizing, visual, visible, various