In this poem, Dickinson has death something that has "stopped for me," a thing that can know, and that has "Civility." These are all features of a person, despite "death" technically being an event or abstract idea. Making an abstract idea have human traits is called "personification."

The very first character introduced into Milton's narrative in Paradise Lost is Satan. While telling the story of Adam and Eve in a new way, the narrative unfolds from Satan's perspective. Milton's epic poem has greatly contributed to the character of Satan in the Western literary tradition.

The limerick is a popular short poem form originating in the British Isles and named after a city in Ireland. A limerick always consists of five lines, with a strict rhythm, and an AABBA rhyme scheme. Limericks are frequently humorous and made of doggerel and satiric statements.

"Common meter" is the name of a simple but specific poetic format, with four lines per stanza, and an alternating rhythm and rhyme scheme. The first and third lines of a common meter poem are eight syllabes in four iambs, while its second and fourth lines are six syllables in three iambs; the rhyme scheme is a simple abab. Emily Dickinson, who wrote the poem from which the stanza in question was excerpted, wrote most of her poems in the common meter.

A haiku is a distinctive form of poetry which is a key feature of the Japanese literary tradition. In addition to its strict form, with each line having only a small number of syllables, the poem's structure also requires a kiru, or "cutting." This shift in tone and emphasis midway through the poem creates a paradox and dichotomy that is central to the genre.

Emily Dickinson spent essentially her entire life in the environs of Amherst, Massachusetts, and most of her poems deal with reflections on life in that community and her family. This simplicity of subject was reflected in her use of the simple common meter, which had an alternating rhyme scheme in four line stanzas featuring alternating lines of four and three iambs each. Despite the seeming simplicity of Dickinson's poems, they often ventured into ruminations on death, love, and loneliness.

In descriptions of poetic meter, the first word indicates the kind of poetic feet, or units of measure, in the line, while the second indicates the number of feet. In "trochaic tetrameter," the feet are trochees, or two syllable feet that each consist of a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. "Tetrameter" indicates there are four feet per line. This meter was famously used in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha.

"Novella" is a diminutive of "novel," and authors will often use the term "novella" to describe a story that falls between a short story and a novel in length. An author will usually choose to do so because he or she believes that a story needs development beyond the length of a short story, but cannot be sustained over the full length of a novel.

A roman à clef, French for "novel with a key," is a term describing a work of literature that is based on actual events and people who are only lightly fictionalized. A chief concern for a novelist in writing a roman à clef is to tell a real story without having to clear everything. Examples of such novels are Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The Irish author James Joyce had experimented with various styles and uses of language throughout his career, in books like Ulysses and The Dubliners. Joyce went even a step further with his final book, Finnegans Wake, which was published in 1939 after seventeen years of writing. The book's language is largely constructed by Joyce, and uses odd slang and forms somewhat based around English to tell a story about the Earwicker family. The book is often cited as one of the most difficult books to read.