38 pages • 1 hour read
Emily DickinsonBecause I Could Not Stop for Death
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Rhythm and Meter
Emily Dickinson’s trademark dashes create the poem’s rhythm and emphasize important words and ideas. Take, for example, the line, “My Tippet — only Tulle —” (Line 16). The dash after “tippet” (a scarf-like shawl worn over a dress) creates a pause called a caesura in the middle of the line. The following phrase, “only Tulle,” therefore stands out after this pause. The phrase notes the flimsiness of this material, tulle, amidst the dark and cold the speaker experiences.
Like many of Dickinson’s poems, “Because I could not stop for Death” employs the formal qualities of the hymns the poet knew with from attending a Calvinist Christian church. Like those hymns, the poem consists of quatrains (stanzas of four poetic lines). In fact, the reader can sing “Because I could not stop for Death” to the tune of the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
The poem’s meter is consistent with the poetic form of the ballad. Each quatrain (except the fourth, which inverts the pattern) begins with an eight-syllable line, followed by a six-syllable line, then eight, then six. These lines are also iambic: If every syllable is a “beat,” the rhythm begins with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. A typical line in the poem scans like this (note the stressed syllable of each iamb in bold):
Be-cause | I could | not stop | for Death –
This pattern repeats throughout the poem.
Rhyme
Dickinson uses frequent, if irregular, end rhyme, with a loose ABCB rhyme scheme that relies on slant rhymes over full rhymes. For instance, although the first stanza rhymes “me” with “immortality” in its second and fourth lines, other stanzas feature near rhymes. The second stanza pairs “away” with “civility,” the fourth has “chill” and “tulle,” and the sixth repeats the sounds of the second in “day” and “eternity.”
The third and fifth stanzas eschew even this loose rhyming structure. In the second stanza, the would-be rhyme of “ring” and “setting” is disrupted by the inclusion of the word “sun” after “setting.” The disruption is crucial—this is the moment in the poem when the speaker realizes that she is no longer moving relative to the world. Instead, it is the sun that is moving while she is standing still. The broken rhyme scheme makes the word “Sun” a hinge that pivots from the curious and dreamy nature of the poem’s first half to its darker and more abstract second half.
In the fifth stanza, Dickinson forgoes a rhyme altogether, and in its place repeats the word “ground”—the location of the speaker’s new home. The repetition reinforces that this home is a grave that is both “of the Ground” and “in the Ground” (Lines 18, 20)—it is the material resting place for the speaker’s body.
Punctuation
Dickinson’s frequent use of dashes is a major characteristic of her work, and the dash appears often in “Because I could not stop for death,” taking the place of periods and commas. The dashes could indicate where the poet believes a pause should take place, whether the poem is being read out loud or silently. The punctuation mark draws attention to the words on either side of the dash, suggesting a slow pace that befits the themes of this poem in particular as the speaker travels towards the end of her life. As well, the dashes suggest an erratic kind of stopping and starting that mimics the random flow of thoughts and ideas as they sometimes appear in an individual’s mind.
The dashes in the poem also mark a linguistic bridge between two words and their corresponding ideas. For example, in the first stanza of the poem, three dashes appear, linking the first three lines with each other and the individual ideas contained in each line. The first line of the poem concerns the fact that the speaker “could not stop for Death” (Line 1); the reason why is unclear, leaving the reader to wonder if the speaker is a busy person who lives full days, a happy person who enjoys life, or even a person who is simply caught up in the unique momentum of her own life and is neither busy nor happy. Though the reasons for the speaker’s inability to stop living are ambiguous, the outcome is very clear, as the word “Death” appears right before the first dash, inviting the reader to linger on the meaning of the word and its appearance in the first line of the poem. The word that immediately follows the dash appears in the next line; the word “He” (Line 2) personifies death as a “kindly” (Line 2) man. The pronoun’s position directly after the dash ensures that the reader can be certain that the pronoun refers to death.
Another major characteristic of Dickinson’s poetry is her unusual use of capitalization. Many of the capitalized words in the poem are internal, meaning that they appear in the middle of a line of poetry rather than at the beginning, and informal, meaning that they do not always identify a proper noun. Dickinson’s unconventional use of capitalization elevates words and the concepts they communicate. For example, Dickinson capitalizes “Children” (Line 9) and “Setting Sun” (Line 12), which represent the elderly stage of life. The poet does not give any indication why she believes these words warrant capitalization, leaving the reader to wonder if the state of childhood as well as old age are indeed more deserving of respect, especially in light of the central image of the poem and its messages around the inevitability of death.
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