Point of View

“Because I could not stop for Death” is spoken from a first-person point of view by the unnamed speaker, a woman in the process of dying. The speaker’s first-person perspective anchors each of the poem’s six quatrains, emphasizing the subjectivity of the poem’s narrative. But as mentioned elsewhere in this guide, Dickinson employs the rhetorical device of chiasmus at multiple points in the poem — notably in lines 1-2 and 12-13 — to invert the speaker’s subjectivity and make her an object, destabilizing her agency. Dickinson arguably undermines the speaker’s agency from the very beginning of the poem by opening it with the conjunction “Because” (1), which frames the poem as a justification for what happened to the speaker.

Though told entirely from the speaker’s first-person point of view, the poem offers little insight into her interiority, focusing instead on external actions...