Assessment objective 2 is about contexts. Plural not singular. There is no single meaning or context which is the correct one.
It is important when addressing AO2 to go beyond surface meaning and story, and to look at underlying ideas and attitudes. Not just the poet’s, but our own.
A second reading leads us to ask ‘Why?’ rather than ‘What?’ and these questions might have more than one answer.
Why does he open the door of the carriage so ‘kindly’? Is this sarcastic?
Why won’t the speaker ‘stop for Death’? Is she in too much of a hurry to get on with her life?
Is ‘Eternity’ the grave? Or is it a suggestion that Death is not the end of the journey, and that there is life beyond the grave?
Dickinson’s beliefs, like those of many poets, were religious but not orthodox. In other words, she is
asking us to think rather than giving us answers.
A lot of the meaning of this poem is a matter of tone, and whether we read lines literally or with irony (that idea that lines can mean two different things at the same time).
Another context to bring in at this point is the role of women at the time the poem was written.
Given the limitations of education for women at the time, how well equipped were they to answer big philosophical questions about life?
Dickinson herself was highly educated and an independent thinker, so the deeper awareness of ideas and attitudes would confront these larger questions about life and death – or mortality.
In nineteenth-century Puritan America. Such free thinking was unusual, especially for women. Dickinson’s poems were unknown and unpublished in her own time, but mean more to us today.
Once you have explored the deeper meanings of a text, you can begin to form your own personal response.
Poetry AO2 video transcript
Assessment objective 2 is about contexts. Plural not singular. There is no single meaning or context which is the correct one.