Also, "Chill" and "Tulle" are half or slant rhymes, meaning they sound really close to a perfect rhyme but there's something a little off. "Me" rhymes with "Immortality" and, farther down the poem, with "Civility" and, finally, "Eternity." Scattering this same rhyme unevenly throughout the poem really ties the sound of poem together. Can you find where? The rhyme isn't regular (meaning it doesn't follow a particular pattern) but there is rhyme in this poem. The important thing to know is that there is a regular pattern here, even if Dickinson, rebel that she is, breaks it a couple of times. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are in the same iambic metrical pattern, but because they have fewer syllables (and therefore only three feet) it's called iambic trimeter (tri = three). Since there are four ("tetra") feet per line, this is called iambic tetrameter. So the first line, if you were to exaggerate it, might sound like this: Be- cause | I could | not stop | for Death, The vertical lines mark the feet. A foot is made up of one unstressed and one stressed syllable. The first and third line in every stanza is made up of eight syllables, or four feet. Iambic meter is supposed to follow the most common pattern of English speech, so if you didn't notice that this poem was written in meter, don't worry about it! That just means Dickinson pulled it off without it sounding forced. Dickinson's quatrains (four-line stanzas) aren't perfectly rhymed, but they sure do follow a regular metrical pattern. If you're familiar with hymns, you'll know they're usually written in rhyming quatrains and have a regular metrical pattern.
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