Poetry

Poetry

Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

In “Because I could not stop for Death,” one of the most celebrated of any poems Emily Dickinson wrote, the deceased narrator reminisces about the day Death came calling on her. In the first stanza, the speaker remarks that she had been too busy to stop for Death, so in his civility, he stopped for her (Lundin, 2006).

Tone, or the emotional stance of the speaker in the poem, is a central artifice in “Because I could not stop for Death.” Though the subject is death, this is not a somber rendering. On the contrary, Death is made analogous to a wooer in what emerges as essentially an allegory, with abstractions consistently personified. Impressed by Death's thoughtfulness and patience, the speaker reciprocates by putting aside her work and free time. Judging by the last stanza, where the speaker talks of having “first surmised” their destination, it can be determined that Death was more seducer than beau (Lundin, 2006). The tone of congeniality here becomes a vehicle for stating the proximity of death even in the thoroughfares of life, though one does not know it. Consequently, one is often caught unprepared. The journey motif is at the core of the poem's stratagem, a common device (as in poem 615, “Our Journey had Advanced”) in Dickinson's poetry for depicting human mortality (Lundin, 2006).



Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

In this poem, the speaker indicates that his horse thinks it “queer” for them to stop, though it is evident that whatever the horse may think or feel, it is the speaker who projects his own anxiety onto the horse. The poem is constructed as the speaker's reflections of the event, and the first line indicates the speaker's sense that the woods are owned. Thus, some nameless feeling of impropriety or perhaps social violation keeps him from his ease. Consequently, his abrupt dismissal of the wood's allure and his lofty response that he has “promises to keep,” though idealistic and possibly true, sounds like a dodge (Poirier, 2005). Mistaking the speaker for Frost himself, one could miss the author's implied criticism of the speaker's sentimentality—who avoids the issue of why he stops by taking refuge in rhetoric and cliché.

To read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as simply a story about a weary traveler longing for the comforts of home, or even to allegorize it as the journey of Everyman, is to miss the subtle qualities that identify it as a Frost lyric. For one thing, Frost balances the onward rhythmic pull of the verse against the obvious stasis of the poetic scene itself: The speaker never arrives, nor really leaves; he is simply always stopping. Frost also arranges the natural scene so as to heighten the drama of the encounter and to reveal its symbolic density. Finally, Frost's sense of dramatic and contextual irony undercut the simplicity of the narrative. After all, despite the speaker's confident assurance about where he is ...