<P> "Because I could not stop for Death" is a lyrical poem by Emily Dickinson first published posthumously in Poems: Series 1 in 1890 . The persona of Dickinson's poem meets personified Death . Death is a gentleman caller who takes a leisurely carriage ride with the speaker to her grave . According to Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition of 1955 the number of this poem is 712 . </P> <P> The poem was published posthumously in 1890 in Poems: Series 1, a collection of Dickinson's poems assembled and edited by her friends Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson . The poem was published under the title "The Chariot". It is composed in six quatrains with the meter alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter . Stanzas 1, 2, 4, and 6 employ end rhyme in their second and fourth lines, but some of these are only close rhyme or eye rhyme . In the third stanza, there is no end rhyme, but "ring" in line 2 rhymes with "gazing" and "setting" in lines 3 and 4 respectively . Internal rhyme is scattered throughout . Figures of speech include alliteration, anaphora, paradox, and personification . The poem personifies Death as a gentleman caller who takes a leisurely carriage ride with the poet to her grave . She also personifies immortality . The volta (turn) happens in the fourth quatrain . Structurally, the syllables shift from its constant 8 - 6 - 8 - 6 scheme to 6 - 8 - 8 - 6 . This parallels with the undertones of the sixth quatrain . The personification of death changes from one of pleasantry to one of ambiguity and morbidity: "Or rather--He passed Us--/ The Dews drew quivering and chill --" (13 - 14). The imagery changes from its original nostalgic form of children playing and setting suns to Death's real concern of taking the speaker to afterlife . </P>

Because i could not stop death by emily dickinson