How can we relate "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" to Dickinson's life?

Modern readers are apt to comment upon the frequency with
which Dickinson returns to this subject of death, but really, so was everyone else in
her culture.  For artists of her time, this preoccupation reflected a pervasive
real-world concern.   In the mid-nineteenth century death rates were high--so high that
parents often gave several of their children the same name since few would survive into
adulthood.  She never lets us forget that in some respects life gave her short measure;
and "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is and effort to cope with her sense of
privation.

Equally, traces of Puritanism tinctured the
religious discourse of Dickinson's young womanhood and members of the Amherst
congregation were regularly exhorted with the blood-stirring urgency of to reflect on
the imminence of their own demise.  The religious thought and language was important to
her poetry because it comprised the semiotic system that her society employed to discuss
the mysteries of life and death. 

The poem, then, is the
apotheosis of that distinctive Dickinson voice, "the speaking dead" offers an
astonishing combination:  this conventional promise of Christianity suffused with the
tonalities of Gothic tradition. 

Yet, the ultimate
implication of this work turns precisely upon Dickinson's capacity to explode the finite
boundaries that generally define our existence--immortality.  As Dickinson discusses,
true immorality comes from the work of art
itself.

Dickinson herself said (in a conversation with
Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1870)

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How do people live without any thoughts. How do
they live.

Dickinson was, for
all practical purposes, a recluse who rarely left her Amherst, MA home in 55-years.  She
spent time alone and rarely attended church (which would have played a prominent role in
shaping the lives of 19th century Americans).

In this poem,
Dickinson heavily sources a metaphysical style, commonly used by 17th century poets. 
The tendency of metaphysical poetry is a psychogical analysis of the emotions of love
and religion, carrying their penchant to shock and awe to an
extreme.