Introduction
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) only published about ten of her estimated 1,800 poems while she was alive. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, Dickinson grew up in a prominent local family. Her father Edward Dickinson was a leading attorney and politician who served one term in Congress as a Whig during the early 1850s. Dickinson had a brother and sister. Her brother married and raised a family himself and lived nearby, but she and her sister never married and remained in the family home as adults. Yet Dickinson was not a recluse and her poems engaged her turbulent times, including the Civil War, though always in her own unique way. Edward Hirsch labels Dickinson “a secret revolutionary” (Heart of American Poetry, 67). He sees such “subversive” methods at work in this poem, “Because I could not stop for Death,” which was probably written around 1862. He notes the “eerie fatalism” of the poem’s perspective, from the viewpoint of a speaker already dead. The emotions Dickinson evokes from this perspective can surprise readers and alter their perspective on death itself. Dickinson’s poems were handwritten and kept in forty homemade volumes. They were untitled and marked up with all kinds of unusual punctuation.
Because I could not stop for Death (#479)
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 strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—
Or rather—He passed us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—