Emily Dickinson's Attitudes Towards Death

What is death? I believe death is a transformation of our life on earth to a spiritual and eternal life. One can not know when it will come or how it may come, but we all know that death is an event that all human lives will encounter at any point. What makes the difference on each one of us is our point of view and what we believe might happen to us at our time of death. In two different poems, “Because I could not stop for death” by Emily Dickinson and “Death be not proud” by John Donne, both talk about death, the writers reflect their personality and religious belief towards such event by personifying death through their diction and structure within the lines. However, these poems differ significantly; Emily Dickinson’s attitude towards death is rather placid, death is view as part of life’s journey, she is optimistic about her fate and sees death as a friend. While in John Donne’s poem he writes of death as a weak entity with no power, and one should not be frighten by it because after we die, we will never have to face it again.
Her poem relates a story of a woman who seems to welcome death as a man she plans to marry. The journey to the grave begins when Death comes calling, “He kindly stopped for me - The Carriage held but just Ourselves - and Immortality” (603). In the carriage is immortality, which means the idea of a spiritual life after death as her religious beliefs. The line “could not stop for Death” (603) indicates that she was not planing for this, “I had to put away my labor and my leisure” (603) the speaker was living her life, she is not thinking about death because she is too busy continuing her life. Death comes in the middle of the day, without us expecting it, some enjoy their life past adulthood, some do