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The Musicality Of Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

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The Musicality of Emily Dickinson Though her strict eight and six syllable ABAB rhyming style may appear to limit her, Emily Dickinson’s influence on music goes far beyond being the rumored protagonist for The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” If you were to compare her poetry to music, she commands her lines and stanzas using dashes as rests and capitalization as accents. Emily Dickinson’s poetry best represents me as a songwriter because of the unique way she dictates and splits rhythms in common meters. In “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Dickinson uses dashes at the end of lines to signal rests, exemplified as how she interposes dashes throughout the first stanza, “because I could not stop for death - he kindly stopped for me - the carriage

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