Strategy Response, Week 5

In Chapter 11 of Writing Poetry, the writers discuss Emily Dickinson's American Romantic poem, generally referred to by its first line: "Because I could not stop for Death." In this section, the text discusses the ways in which one might write a typically fantastical subject in a very common manner. Utilizing Dickinson's poem, we find that she indeed treats Death with an almost loving tone, calling this personified version of a tragic event "kind" (2) and "Civil" (8) while he rides in a carriage with her. Even as contemporary readers more than a hundred years later, we find such a drastically opposite-to-general representation of Death backwards and romantic (in terms of both "loving" and "of the Romantic Movement").

Dickinson goes on to describe the scenes that she and Death pass, all equally romantic images, before she slips into the present and remembers the quickness with which the previous scenes passed (9-24). Classically, images of "Recess" (10), "Fields of Gazing Grain" (11), and "the Setting Sun" (12) represent still more romantic settings for two lovers to convene over, while a classic trope of love includes time passing quickly (as evidenced in aubades). Therefore, Dickinson uses many common elements of a love poem and of the American Romanticist Movement to express Death in a distinctly different way from most before her, revealing him to be not merely a "person" but also loving rather than demonic.