How does Emily Dickinson present the religious theme in her poem,
Because I could not stop for Death? 10 Marks
Answers
Explanation:
Emily Dickinson had many major themes in her writing. These themes include: religion, death, home and family, nature and love.
Emily Dickinson was a religious person; religion is brought up many times in her poems. She speaks of God and Heaven in many of her poems. Some of her poems that include religious aspects are: "God permits industrious angels", "Going to Heaven!", "I went to Heaven", and "Bless God, he went as soldiers" (The Poetry of Emily Dickinson).
Answer:
“Because I could not stop for death” is an exploration of both the inevitability of death and the uncertainties that surround what happens when people actually die.
Explanation:
In the poem, a woman takes a ride with a personified “Death” in his carriage, by all likelihood heading towards her place in the afterlife. It's not clear if the speaker is already dead, or she is traveling towards death. Either way, her death is presented as something natural, strange, and inescapable.Indeed, the poem’s opening lines make this clear. The speaker herself couldn’t “stop for Death”—and not many people would—but “Death” has every intention of stopping for her. Also in the carriage is “Immortality.” It’s not clear if this is another personified figure—a kind of chaperone—or something more abstract.“Immortality” is ambiguous here. Its presence could support the Christian idea of the afterlife—which some critics feel runs throughout Dickinson’s poems. Or, by contrast, “Immortality” could be somewhat ironic, hinting at the permanent nothingness that awaits in death. Either way, such is the eternal inevitability of “Death” that he himself is in “no haste.” On the one hand, “Death’s” kind and calm treatment of the woman could signal the comfort of a Christian afterlife—entrance to heaven and an eternity in God’s presence. But more darkly, the way that the poem plays with ideas of immortality and eternity can also be read as nothing more than the dark nothingness of death itself—that life, when it’s gone, is gone for good.