A Comparison of Because I Could Not Stop For Death and Up-hill

It is quite peculiar that there are people who are not afraid of dying or death. Admittedly, most of us are either too afraid to face death or death itself. However, there are exceptions to the rule; and notably, Emily Dickinson and Cristina Rossetti are just some of the people who lovingly welcome the idea. Since both are also poets, they were able to portray their ideas regarding the matter through poems.

In Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, she used a technique of remembering imagery of/from the past to elucidate never-ending conceptions; and this; she was able to do through establishing a dialectical relationship between one’s imagination and reality. In her poem, she suggested the subject of interconnection and the reciprocally determined personalities of the known and unknown through viewing the particular correlations between the two holistically and hierarchically.

Moreover, she talks about death and eternity. And from the perspective of eternity, she remembered experiences that happened so long time ago and from those recollections, she endeavors the eternal world through its rapport with sequential standards.

For Dickinson, Death is a kind and comforting gentleman and she adds positive subtexts about it. In this particular poem, Dickinson eternally combines and increasingly orders the temporal world with divine universe. She was able to dialectically shape some sense from the confines of life; thus permitting her readers to have a temporary glance to a universe which have an outwardly different and sporadic stages of existence that at the same time is holistically purposed and drawn in (Dickinson).

Meanwhile, Cristina Rossetti also flirted with the same topic on her poem “Uphill”. In this poem, she talks about the never-ending struggles that we have to endure in life. She successfully achieved it by comparing life to an extensive and hard journey uphill—coated with lots of metaphor that is obvious all throughout the poem.

Obviously, the poem is about a traveler inquiring another traveler about the whole journey. Furthermore, the poem is constructed in such a way that Traveler 1 will ask a question and Traveler 2 will answer him back and this goes on until the end of the poem. But yet, if we examine the poem closely, it is more than that.

There is so much symbolism and allegory in the poem. In this poem, symbolism inspired Rossetti to write—there are overflowing concealed meanings through the use of allegory. Through closer examination, allegory is fabricated in the course of the entire poem rather then just having it within two lines or so.

Nevertheless, the main theme that Rossetti wants to impart to her readers is that no matter how long or hard a journey one may encounter, there will be Someone who will never let you go (in this case, God) and that one cannot miss heaven. Since she is devout Anglican, her poems are at the same time about the idea of Death and religion. This particular poem talks about that topic in a sorrowful and death-obsessed manner (Rossetti).

Both authors and poems reiterate the concept of death. In these two particular examples, the difference is how the authors created and styled their poems in different manners. Emily Dickinson used metaphors to convey her message while Christina Rossetti used allegory in her poems. This only shows that both are gifted authors.

But more important than that is the fact that no matter how many people view death as a gruesome loss, there will always be people who are courageous enough to accept it and welcome it with open arms—and these two poets are exception to that.

Works Cited:

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” March 2, 2008  <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/stop.html>.

Rossetti, Christina. “Uphill.” March 2, 2008