Symbols in ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ by Emily Dickinson Essay

The third stanza involves an interesting paradox-like time span where the narrator is describing different scenarios that they are passing in the Carriage each of the three correspond to a moment in the narrator's life. "We passed the School, where Children strove / At Recess in the Ring / We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain / We passed the Setting Sun" (9-12). Each of the scenes represents a moment in her life. The children in the playground correspond to her childhood, the fields of grain relate to her adult years when she worked, and the setting sun is her death. Dickinson uses repetition here to get the point across that they are traveling a great distance and passing a wide range of different places rather than just high tailing it to the end of her life.
The following stanza is a brief one with the only true purpose of letting the reader know that the narrator had not planned for her adventure with death, but at the same time surprisingly prepared at the same time. As the sun goes down the night dew begins to form and the air gets more brisk. The narrator is wearing gossamer, which is not the warmest of clothing being that it is, by definition, a thin wedding gown. So there are two arguments to be considered here. Either the narrator was completely unprepared for the journey with death and is underdressed accidentally, or that she was wearing this wedding gown to symbolize her marriage to Death.
In the final two stanzas Death leads the narrator to her burial spot, which is referred to as her home meaning that it is going to be her resting place. The "home" is described as one with a dirt roof that isn't seeable being that it blends with the rest of the grass around it. The final three lines represent a paradox flashing back to when she first got on that carriage. Our narrator says "Feels shorter than the day/ I first surmised the horses' heads/ were toward eternity" (12-14), meaning that everything she is speaking about feels as though it happen yesterday, when it really happen a long time ago.
There are extremely strong poetic elements in this poem. The tone is based around the speaker's calm acceptance of death and riding along with Death without being panicked. I am inferring as a reader that Emily Dickinson is writing about her own perspective of death and how she is actually prepared for it. She seems to believe that death is not the end, but a new beginning, a step towards eternity. This poem is heavy on symbolism with each character and setting representing something different. The Carriage representing her slow journey through life, where she sees the children at play and the fields reminding her of her childhood and her adulthood. Death and Immortality are the only two characters specified in the poem representing the actual action of dying and then the state of being post-mortem.