The Ecstasy of Death in Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Abstract

Death is used to be known as the tragic end of life for many people; it is the point when a person is forced to give up, admit defeat, and bow down to the inevitable. As depressing as this view of death may seem, Dickinson submitted death in a quite different vision by focusing on the immortality and the afterlife aspects of death. This paper will show the ecstasy of death in Dickinson's poem “Because I could not stop for death”. In this poem, Dickinson was optimistic and saw death in a friendly light rather than as a horrible end. Dickinson succeeded in showing her pleasant attitude towards death. In this poem death is portrayed as a gentleman who takes a woman on an enjoyable journey to the grave, and then to the beautiful everlasting life, the life after death. Dickinson wanted to explore a very strange but a rather pleasant image about death. Marrying death would in many ways take her away from everything she severed in life, enter her into a life of immortality.