Thursday, February 5, 2015
"Because I Could Not Stop For Death" #479
In this poem Dickinson personifies Death in a interesting way. She assigns Death a gender in the second stanza. Death appears to the speaker almost as if they are a male suitor. Death shows up in a horse drawn carriage which is reminiscent of the ferry that carried the souls to Hell in Dante's Inferno. The speaker has a very calming tone when speaking about Death giving the reader the impression that they are comfortable the idea of dying. It was unclear to me if speaker had just passed away or if they had been dead for a while, and were perhaps reminiscing. In the final stanza the speaker says, "Since then - 'tis Centuries - and yet / Feels shorter than the Day." The mentioning of "centuries" through me off, because up until this point everything sounded as if it had happened recently. The final image that we are left with is that of "Horses' Heads" pointing toward eternity. This is a very strong and unusual image to leave us with especially because this is the first mention of the horses. I interpreted this image as being symbolic of the journey into the afterlife.
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I feel that when it is speaking on the "centuries" bit it is referring to the way death interacts with the world. First off is separate death from reality, I got that the death did indeed happen recently. However, death can it feel as if grief has lasted for centuries, and yet it may have only been a day or so. At least that is what I took from it. But perhaps if we were to take it the other way death could personify a sort of memory, maybe someone could have died long ago, but memories could keep them alive making it feel like they died recently. Either way it could work but I tend to gravitate towards the first option.
ReplyDeleteI understood the "centuries" line in the opposite way from Wesley. To me it makes more sense that the death did happen long ago but it means to suggest that we leave the world slowly after were dead. This makes sense of the horses because as they head toward etenity time would become meaningless which is why the speaker say " and yet /
ReplyDeleteFeels shorter than the Day." I believe the poem is discussing not only how death is can be comforting but also how the parts of our lives we put value into remember us implicitly even if people forget. At least that's the best sense I could make out of the house in the fifth stanza.