Because I could not stop for Death –

>Because I could not stop for Death –
>He kindly stopped for me –
>The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
>And a Pot in which to Pee.

Why is she considered a great poet again?

>I dwell in mozzarellity -
What did she mean by this

she was all looks

Because I know some stupid fucks on Veeky Forums haven't read the most entry level poetry in the world

>Because I could not stop for Death –
>He kindly stopped for me –
>The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
>And Immortality.

Look at the words.
Because I could not STOP for Death.
What does 'stop' even mean here? Die?
Note that the ONLY whole concrete word in the entire poem referenced is CARRIAGE. What is one supposed to make of that? Well, for one, a carriage (like a poem) is a vehicle- what freight does it purport to bear, and why?
Dickinson is every bit as clever with language as Joyce is, and employs all the poetic devices that Blake does but with FAR more economy and subtlety than either. She loves to riddle and not just pun, but pun in triplicate. It's uncanny. ALL her senses time and again bear directly on her subject. She's not just a great poet, she's an amazing poet. Learning just to gain a sense of this in 2018 is perhaps more trouble than it's worth, however, if one doesn't care for poetry in general.

Those 'children' 'striving' at 'recess' in 'the ring' aren't just playing ring-around-the-rosie, user. What's a recess?

But poetry is not merely a play on words, and one of the greatest defects of modern poetry generally is that pretentious wordplay inhibits rather than facilitates the essential poetry. That is not great poetry, it is constipated. But at least she's not nearly as bad as T. S. Eliot.

I agree. But that she loads all this stuff in hymn meter (Watts) with a goof on it here and there for effect makes her oddly prophetic of modern times. Plus one CAN read much of her poetry in a way that Because I Could not stop for Death lends itself to, as a kind of easy-going allegory. When first published this stuff was hugely popular. She literally has (had) something for everybody, like Shakespeare (did).

>What does 'stop' even mean here? Die?
What does it mean then? I always have trouble with poetry because of shit like this. There's always got to be a deeper level, something not revealed to mere plebs like me.

Dickinson once called poetry 'this loved philology' and again, she's every bit the philologist Nietzsche was (if an autodidact as a classicist). To be quite honest, I don't know (about stop) because just about anything (you) can come up with will *seem* to fit and thereby change the complection of all the other words, which also have histories and inevitably more than a single meaning. What's weird is that almost anything remotely near the word will seem to fit and not stray too far from the idea I believe she ultimately wants to convey, which unironically is something like: Fuck all of you, I KNOW I'm a great poet, and will be read so long as English is read. (She's also a woman, user. But what a woman).
There are operative words in this poem that tease us out of reading it as it *seems* to be given to us. One is Immortality (if Death is some burnoosed figure riding along in a carriage, and Me some fully accoutred belle standing by the way, then how does one likely figure Immortality, who's ALSO riding along in the carriage?) another is Carriage (which most clearly represents the poem itself, I feel, but that would take too long to justify) another is the verb 'strived,' yet another is Death itself.
Like Shakespeare Dickinson (as I believe another user was on the verge of pointing out) does sacrifice tonality (or musicality) to Mind, or sense. The Sonnets are impressive as rhetorical documents, but are not near so musical as a poet like Campion, who came before, or Yeats, who of course came way after. Similarly many of Dickinson's poems read like weird hymns, or even ditties (like this one), i.e. like something other than 'poetry'. Shakespeare's sonnets remind me more of Tom Paine's prose, tonally, than anything else I can think of at the moment.
This is becoming rather diffuse, a very bad disquisition. But here's an exercise. Read the poem again but imagine that (you) are yourself 'Death' and that the 'Carriage' is the poem itself. It may help so far as seeing her in a different light is concerned. Good luck. Youre not a pleb. Dickinson is (wonderfully) exasperating.