journey with death
A Journey with Death In “Because I could not stop for Death” Dickinson has tried to grapple with the perplexing tension between time and timelessness. ... “Because I could not stop for death” (1), the speaker explains, “He kindly stopped for me-” (2) for the speaker to stop that is to die would mean that she would lose consciousness; she would no longer be capable of hearing or seeing. ... But it is death that stops in this poem, and when death stops being Ismail 2 death, then immortality follows: “The Carriage held but just ourselves-and immortality”(3-4) And yet ‘Immortality’ as it is presented in the poem is not just something toward which human beings journey in death. ... Rather it is a component of consciousness itself, somehow coextensive not only with death but with life as well: the speaker, death and immortality all occupy the same carriage at the same time.