In "Because I could not stop for death" how does the speaker feel about herself, others, and the subject? What is the author's attitude? How does...

In this poem, there are some indications about how the speaker, a woman who is taking a carriage ride with Death and Immortality, feels about herself, others, and the subject of dying. First, although she doesn't fight the experience, she is not confident in this journey and she does not feel prepared. We see this in the fact that she "could not stop for Death," but more powerfully when she describes her inappropriate dress. She...

In this poem, there are some indications about how the speaker, a woman who is taking a carriage ride with Death and Immortality, feels about herself, others, and the subject of dying. First, although she doesn't fight the experience, she is not confident in this journey and she does not feel prepared. We see this in the fact that she "could not stop for Death," but more powerfully when she describes her inappropriate dress. She is wearing only "Gossamer" and "Tulle," extremely lightweight fabrics, and she feels the deepening "Chill" as they approach the graveyard.

The only other "people" that are mentioned directly in the poem are Death and Immortality, personifications of these abstract concepts. She finds Death, the driver of the carriage, to be kind and civil, making it easier for her to go with him. Of her earthly relationships we have only one slight clue. When passing the schoolyard, she describes how the children "strove at recess in the ring." This makes recess time sound like a boxing match, indicating that her life may have contained more interpersonal conflict than she liked.

How does she feel about dying? She feels unprepared, as mentioned, but also resigned and perhaps perplexed. She says she had "put away my labor and my leisure," without bemoaning that fact, so she finds it easy to comply with the summons of death. The last stanza shows she has still not quite gotten used to Eternity, for she compares it to what time used to feel like. So although she doesn't share any deep negative emotions about the experience of death, neither does she seem happy or excited. Her reserved emotion about a topic that usually engenders great fear, regret, and sorrow makes this poem both ironic and haunting.

Your other questions about how the author feels about the speaker, subject, and reader and what the author's attitude is cannot be answered from the text of this poem. Authors often write poems in the voice of a persona, a fictional person who they choose to take on the character of when writing a specific poem. It is incorrect to assume from the text of a poem that we know what the author herself feels about anything. Emily Dickinson wrote 1789 poems. They contain a wide variety of viewpoints even on a single topic. You could try to construct her beliefs about death from this poem, but she wrote probably hundreds of poems that touch on death, and many would have different perspectives than this poem has. To answer questions about what an author herself believed about certain subjects, you would need to refer to other works written by the author, either letters or autobiography. Emily Dickinson was a mysterious person in that she did not go out into the world very much but lived most of her life at home. No one knew she was writing this much poetry until she had passed away. It is best when studying an Emily Dickinson poem to not read too much about the author herself into the poem but to take it as a free-standing work of art and interpret it only within its own context.