Death kindly stopped for me
...tes they drove very slowly, because death did not know speed. She says she puts away her labor and her responsibilities for his civility. She believes she has a choice that she can willingly do these things, but in actuality, these actions were designated by death. She says she does these things because of his politeness, this also contradicts the negative connotations we have about death. The third and fourth stanzas represent the three stages of life, the past, present, and future. “We passed the school, where children strove At Recess - -in the ring” represents her childhood. To show that the present she uses personification to represent the grains studious attention to them as they passed. The setting of the sun symbolizes the future. It is a sure thing that the sun is going to set, but it is not quite there yet. Dickinson starts the fifth stanza with irony. After saying that we past the future, represented by the sun, she recants that statement and says, “Or rather he passed us”. The sun passing signified that she was dead. The world around her was moving and going on with daily life, while she is stuck in a particular time and cannot move forward towards the future. Since the sun was going down, nightfall came, and the dew grew chill. Her body was cold, because she was buried in a th...