The Popularity of Death
Kimberlee Peterson
ENG 125
Professor Linda Perkins
January 22, 2009
The Popularity of Death
Death can be a silent killer or it can be heard around the world. It can give you a notice or it can be instantaneous. Death does not judge or prioritize. It does not ask for your consent; however death is a finality that we will all have to come face to face with one day. Death is a mysterious part of life that we all wonder about, but no one really has answers to. For that reason, I feel that authors that write poetry and short stories, such as: Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not wait for Death”, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, use death as a theme in many of their works.
One element of death is the adventure to dying. Some wonder what the will smell last before they die, some want to know what they will hear. Emily Dickinson focuses on what she sees on her journey to the afterlife. In Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not wait for Death” is evident that death is the theme. In the title she is already showing the importance of death in her poem by capitalizing the D in “Death” (1863, p. 810). The title also hints that she may be taking us through what she considers her journey to death because only the first letters in the first and last words are capitalized showing the reader that the poems beginning is important going down the other words in the title to a definite end.
Emily Dickinson uses personification when writing about death as if it were a person, “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me -” (1863, p. 810). She not only treats death as a person, but as a kind person. She writes “We slowly drove –he knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility” (1863 p. 810). When Emily Dickinson writes, “We slowly drove – he knew no haste” she is stating that she is dying slowly and death could be a kind visitor to take her on her journey along...