Discuss how Emily Dickinson makes universal comments from her own reflections and experiences in, "Because I Could Not Stop For Death."

Emily Dickinson was a young woman of limited experience,
but not reflection. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, except for a year at school and a
seven-month stay in Boston, Dickinson did not leave the area in which she lived.
However, she was a great reader, also:

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maintaining lively correspondences with friends
and relatives.

Along with a
wondrous imagination, she wrote relevant and realistic
poetry.

It is
paradoxical that a woman who led such a circumscribed and apparently uneventful life
managed to acquire the rich perceptions that enabled her to write 1,775 poems unlike any
others in the English
language.

Emily's father was
a successful lawyer. Though neither of Emily's parents were emotionally demonstrative,
family life with her siblings and a father was often away, provided her with inspiration
to write about feelings and relationships.

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Emily was educated at Amherst; she also lived for
a time at a house where "Emily’s window overlook[ed] the West Street Cemetery where
daily burials occurred.

Emily
and her sister nursed her mother through an illness that began in the early 1860s, until
her mother's death in 1882. Her father died suddenly in 1874. Death is a common topic in
her poems.

Emily was also very intelligent, obviously
enough to project herself into situations where she had never been, as with the poem,
"Because I could not stop for Death." It would seem that through observation and
reflection, Emily was well aware that death did not ever "take a holiday." It appeared
whether one was prepared or not.

The poet title="personification"
href="http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_P.html">personifies death:
Dickinson gives it human characteristics, and the word is capitalized as a name would
be, or to stress its importance (or even its eventuality). The busy
life the speaker has led has not provided time for him/her to slow down for Death, but
Death "kindly" stops for the speaker. Dickinson presents her sense of common day manners
and etiquette in the way she speaks of Death's behavior, as if he
is doing the speaker a favor.

One source mentions that in
the poem, as a woman, the speaker could not travel alone with Death—which would have
been inappropriate by standards of the day—but is "chaperoned" by
"Immortality."

It is probably also within the realm of her
experience to have gone many times on a casual ride in a carriage. Once again, the scene
is likened to a relaxing jaunt through the countryside. There is no concern or fear: she
respectfully puts away her "labor, and my leisure, too" for the benefit of Death. They
are both being very polite as two individuals would be, even if they were not overly
familiar with one another.

On countless days carriages
passed children at school, whether the youngsters worked or played. Perhaps when
she was young, she was one of those children. And while a wagon
carrying a casket might be seen from the building, it would not given many pause as
children are quickly distracted and move on with their
play.

The rest of the poem comes from observance and
imagination: passing grain fields, the setting sun (end of day/end of life). And then
they arrive at her "resting place." It is not much more than a swelling in the ground;
perhaps Dickinson walked through a local cemetery at times, wondering about the names on
the stones.

The length of her rest has passed quickly, as
did the day on which she realized her life in this world was
over.

Her topic is universal—death is! Dickinson merely
personalizes it using her imagination and perhaps not-so-limited
insights.