I come back often because you have the only philosophy blog worth reading. This brings to mind her cryptic poem on the spider whose web was his 'Strategy of Immortality. She sees Death as kind and gentlemanly, readily getting into his carriage to journey to destinations unknown. The poem does not in the least strive after the incomprehensible. We know that she had classical training including the study of Latin.
This is because her dying day was the last day in which anything happened. The carriage is symbolic of a hearse and carries the speaker, who is symbolized as humanity, and her suitor, who is symbolized as death. She cannot stop Death when she wants to. It clearly shows that funeral is definitely not their final destination. The first stanza the persona is yearning to leave the physical life and start a new life that is eternal and spiritual. The speaker of the poem Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson is a girl whose marriage proposal has been confirmed.
Like Hardy and Whitman she must be read entire; like Shakespeare she never gives up her meaning in a single 1ine. Remoteness is fused with nearness, for the objects that are observed during the journey are made to appear close by. This glimpses that the speaker is resting somewhere and it is her soul travelling in the chariot. Taking us without consent from our lives which we already have no power over , and thrusting us into an incomprehensible eternity is not exactly a kind act to commit, thus irony was used in this case. The content of death in the poem eludes forever any explicit definition.
This demand is not metaphysical, it is not in the afterlife; it functions within the world of the senses, although it takes us beyond the limits of the construction of the self. The style and form of the poem is also unique. Puritan theology may have given her a fear of the loneliness of death, the Bible and hymnal may have provided her with patterns and phrases, but these equip her with terminologies, molds in which her personal conceptions can take form, rather than actual Christian conceptions. Her unsurpassed precision of statement is due to the directness with which the abstract framework of her thought acts upon its unorganized material. For at least as the third stanza conceives of it, the journey toward eternity is a series of successive and, in the case of the grain, displaced visions giving way finally to blankness.
The love-death symbolism, however, re-emerges with new implications in the now restored fourth stanza, probably omitted by previous editors because they were baffled by its meaning: For only Gossamer, my gown My TippetÂonly Tulle This is certainly not a description of conventional burial clothes. The poem puts away the labor and leisure of dogma and convention in order for us to experience the sublime space where they fail. What are they fighting over? What does it mean to talk of dying, as though we are doing something active? The moment at which she recalls the recognition of this loss is the moment at which her voice, in the present, ceases once more. Life is a short span of time that death allows. Her poetry is a magnificent personal confession, blasphemous and, in its self-revelation, its implacable honesty, almost obscene.
At the heart of this heart is fear. The relationship between the two figuresÂanalogous to that between circumference and awe P 1620 Âattracts none of her notice. American Literature: The Makers and the Making. But the journey she describes is intriguing: is it faintly comical, or grimly macabre? Many critics may agree that Death is the important subject of the poem, but they each have their own view of how this theme is interpreted. In reality, the lines offer the first of several ironic reversals of what Dickinson suggests might be but isn't.
He seduces or outright rapes Persephone and then takes her to the Greek underworld to live as his Queen. The terms house and cornice, because of their ironic application to the grave, stress the inadequacy of the conventional, sentimental, and mythic metaphors we cherish and live by as compared to the elemental infinitude of earth, death, and rhythm. Dickinson describes children playing, which also gives the poem a more affable mood. Centuries have gone by since then, though the time that has passed feels shorter than the day. She conveys her feeling of being outside time and change. Stanza six is sexual consummation of the marriage. Death is often thought of as dark and frightening, and if we could choose someone to play the role of death, they would fit into this description, but Dickinson seems to describe death as a gentleman, almost like a potential suitor, coming to take her away in a carriage to eternity.
Both immortality and death, however, need personification and are given it. And yet at the same time, this nothingness has a positive side to it, not for the speaker, but for the reader. On the surface it seems like just another version of the procession to the grave, but this is a metaphor that can be probed for deeper levels of meaning, spiritual journeys of a very different sort. Although death stops for her, her journey itself becomes an endless quest for Eternity. In the second stanza Death and the speaker ride along without concern for time. She always dressed in white and remained a recluse.