Emily Dickinson’s View of the Afterlife

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Describe Emily Dickinson’s view of the afterlife A loner by choice, Emily Dickinson chose to live a life of solitude and face the harsh world with a calm disposition. In ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’ we see her quirky sense of life. She is composed as she describes her death and the inevitable end, something not a lot of us can master. This poem also shows her idiosyncrasy style, with dashes, very tight with a rhyme scheme and the use of capitalized words in the middle of the sentence. Dickinson views death as an enchanting carriage ride to ‘a House’, and not a scary experience as a lot would expect. The carriage holds not only ‘just Ourselves’ but also a friend, ‘Immortality’. It’s as if she is friendly with immortality and it is going in the same ride to death too. She acknowledges them as ‘we’ and both Death and Dickinson knows ‘no haste’. A process of passing away, they transcends time as she sees glimpse upon different stages of her life- ‘the school’ where ‘children strove’, the ‘Fields of Gazing Grain’ and the ‘Setting Sun/ or rater – He passed us’. She remembers her young innocent school days, to her period of growing up like a ripening grain and describes how fast time is as it passes her in the sunset of her older days. She arrives to a ‘Swelling of the Ground’, which symbolizes her ‘house’, signifying how comfortable she is inside her tomb or cemetery. As she lets the romantic in her free, she describes Death as a gentleman suitor who ‘kindly stopped’ for her. The capitalized ‘Death’ conveys a sense of character for it. She puts away her ‘labour’ ‘leisure too’, everything she has in life, for his ‘Civility’. She is trying to say that death is not unpleasant by taking away life but it’s an unstoppable part of the cycle of life. She also describes her marriage to Death, signifying both the final deal in demise and, like marriage itself, an

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