Today’s Poem: Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Emily Dickinson alone in the dark

Wojciech Weiss, Pogrzeb, 1904 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Because I Could Not Stop for Death

by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me. 
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality. 

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure, too, 
For his civility. 

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of grazing grain,
We passed the setting sun. 

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound. 

Since then ‘tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than that day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward Eternity. 

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Reading Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), we can readily feel that for every poem that begins, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” there are five more poems that begin with such lines as, “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” or “I felt a funeral in my brain.” And we may ask ourselves, Why are poets so obsessed with death? 

The answer, of course, is that poets are obsessed with reality. And what’s more real than death? Death is the reality, inescapable and universal. In the Phaedo, as Plato recounts the last days of Socrates in 399 B.C., Cebes says to his friend, the doomed philosopher, that there is “a child within us to whom death is a sort of hobgoblin; him too we must persuade not to be afraid when he is alone in the dark.”

Socrates, the philosopher, persuades by feats of reason. The poet, in a feat of imagination, goes out to sit in the dark alone, to see what it might be like. This too is a form of persuasion. Witness the eighteen-year-old Christina Rossetti, born the same year as Emily Dickinson, whose “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” appeared here in Poems Ancient and Modern the day before yesterday. Rossetti’s speaker goes out alone, not only into the darkness of death, but into the darkness outside the brilliant circle in which two people are “dearest” to each other. 

For the speaker of that poem, it’s not death itself so much as loneliness — and the capacity to feel that loneliness — that becomes the hobgoblin. The cessation of consciousness, then, as a prospect, becomes the persuasive consolation. By contrast, Dickinson’s speakers are all too conscious. They follow, with full awareness, the events of their deaths, until some final moment when the plank breaks, knowing ceases, time vanishes into the distance, and eternity sets in. As the hanged man knows when the trap door opens, Dickinson’s speakers, too, feel the plunge.

Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson, circa 1846 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, in Dickinson’s characteristic slant-rhymed common- or hymn-meter quatrains, not only describes but experiences, in immediate, first-person terms, death as a leavetaking. That famous carriage, where the speaker rides with the two seeming opposites, Death and Immortality, passes by degrees all the living world: the human liveliness of children in a schoolyard, the growing grain. Everything still anticipating a future flashes past and is gone, in an all-too-swift series of goodbye glimpses. The carriage passes even the sunset, emblematic of the borders of time, to stop at the “house” of the grave. There the centuries evaporate. Eternity begins. If we are afraid on the brink of the plunge, death’s very vastness makes our fear look like nothing, small as a child left behind in the dark. 

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It’s worth noting, by the way, that what you are reading here is the public-domain version of this famous poem, which appears in the 1890 edition of Dickinson’s verse, edited by her literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and her friend (and her brother Austin’s paramour), Mabel Loomis Todd. You might like to compare this five-stanza version with the poem as it appears in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin and first published in 1951 by Harvard University Press. 

Also, two recent books may be of interest to our readers:

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell — the first edition of Dickinson’s letters since 1958.

Renée Bergland’s Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, which provides a fascinating look at a transatlantic nineteenth-century intellectual world.

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