Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Frances Bzowski (essay date 1984)

Frances Bzowski (essay date 1984)

”A Continuation of the Tradition of the Irony of Death,” Dickinson Studies, No. 54, Bonus 1984, pp. 33-37.

[In the following excerpt, Bzowski examines Dickinson's “Because I could not stop for Death” in the context of the medieval Dance of Death tradition, which was intended to remind people of the close relationship between life and death.]

In approaching any poem by Emily Dickinson, the wary reader is wise to keep in mind the advice given by John Bunyan in one of the closing quatrains of his Pilgrim's Progress:

Put by the Curtains, look within my Vail:
Turn up my Metaphors and do not fail
There, if thou seekest them, such things to find,
As will be helpful to an honest mind.

Just as Bunyan warned his reader to look beyond the curtaining veil of his metaphors, so, too, does Emily Dickinson employ techniques of veiled meaning, which, when uncovered, often reveal startling...

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