the soul is one’s true person (essence, not mask). no personification is needed, except
possibly what may be involved in the separable concept of the soul itself. Both
immortality and death, however, need personification and are given it. The horses’ heads
are toward eternity, but not toward immortality.
Incidentally, why "amorous but genteel"? To those who believe in an
,afterlife, death may be kind in taking us from a world of proverbial woe into one of
equally proverbial eternal bliss; the irony is in the contrast between our fear of death
and the kindness of his mission, and it seems unnecessary to call upon an amorous
implication. The idea of the "Bride of Christ" may be permissible but it seems
far-fetched in the context of the poem as we have it. /96/
from "’Becasue I Could Not Stop for Death,’" American Literature,
XXIX (March, 1957), 96.
CHARLES R. ANDERSON
[Emily Dickinson's] finest poem on the funeral ceremony [is "Because I could not
stop for Death"]. On the surface it seems like just another version of the procession
to the grave, but this is a metaphor that can be probed for deeper levels of meaning,
spiritual journeys of a very different sort. . . . /241/ At first reading, the orthodox
reassurance against the fear of death appears to be invoked, though with the novelty of a
suitor replacing the traditional angel, by emphasizing his compassionate mission in taking
her out of the woes of this world into the bliss of the next. ‘Death,’ usually rude,
sudden, and impersonal, has been transformed into a kindly and leisurely gentleman.
Although she was aware this is a last ride, since his ‘Carriage’ can only be a
hearse, its terror is subdued by the ‘Civility’ of the driver who is merely serving
the end of ‘Immortality.’ The loneliness of the journey, with Death on the driver’s
seat and her body laid out in the coach behind, is dispelled by the presence of her
immortal part that rides with her as a co-passenger, this slight personification being
justified by the separable concept of the soul. Too occupied with life herself to stop,
like all busy mortals, Death ‘kindly stopped’ for her. But this figure of a gentleman
taking a lady for a carriage ride is carefully underplayed and then dropped after two
stanzas. /242/
The balanced parallelism of the first stanza is slightly quickened by the alliterating
‘labor’ and ‘leisure’ of the second, which encompass vividly all that must be renounced in
order to ride ‘toward Eternity.’ So the deliberate slow-paced action that lies suspended
behind the poem is charged with a forward movement by the sound pattern, taking on a kind
of inevitability in the insistent reiteration of [stanza three]. . . . Here her intensely
conscious leave-taking of the world is rendered with fine economy, and instead of the
sentimental grief of parting there is an objectively presented scene. The seemingly
disparate parts of this are fused into a vivid re-enactment of the mortal experience. It
includes the three stages of youth, maturity, and age, the cycle of day from morning to
evening, and even a suggestion of seasonal progression from the year’s upspring through
ripening to decline. The labor and leisure of life are made concrete in the joyous
activity of children contrasted with the passivity of nature and again, by the optical
illusion of the sun’s setting, in the image of motion that has come to rest. Also the
whole range of the earthly life is symbolized, first human nature, then animate, and
finally inanimate nature. But, absorbed ‘in the Ring’ of childhood’s games, the players at
life do not even stop to look up at the passing carriage of death. And the indifference of
nature is given a kind of cold vitality by transferring the stare in the dead traveler’s
eyes to the ‘Gazing Grain.’ This simple maneuver in grammar creates an involute paradox,
giving the fixity of death to the living corn while the corpse itself passes by on its
journey to immortality. Then with the westering sun, traditional symbol of the soul’s
passing, comes the obliterating darkness of eternity. Finally, the sequence follows the
natural route of a funeral train, past the schoolhouse in the village, then the outlying
fields, and on to the remote burying ground.
In the concluding stanzas the movement of the poem slows almost to a stop, ‘We paused’
contrasting with the successive sights ‘We passed’ in the earlier stages of the journey.
For when the carriage arrives at the threshold of the house of death it has reached the
spatial limits of mortality. To say that it ‘passed the Setting Sun’ is to take it out of
/243/ bounds, beyond human time, so she quickly corrects herself by saying instead that
the sun ‘passed Us,’ as it surely does all who are buried. Then, as the ‘Dews’ descend
‘quivering and chill,’ she projects her awareness of what it will be like to come to rest
in the cold damp ground. The identification of her new ‘House’ with a grave is achieved by
the use of only two details: a ‘Roof’ that is ’scarcely visible’ and a ‘Cornice,’ the
molding around the coffin’s lid, that is ‘in the Ground.’ But the tomb’s horror is
absorbed by the emphasis on merely pausing here, as though this were a sort of tavern for
the night. When she wanted to she could invoke the conventional Gothic atmosphere, and
without being imitative, as in an early poem:
What Inn is this
Where for the night
Peculiar Traveller comes?
Who is the Landlord?
Where the maids?
Behold, what curious rooms!
No ruddy fires on the hearth—
No brimming Tankards flow—
Necromancer! Landlord!
Who are these below?
[#115—Poems,
1891, p. 221]
The image of the grave as a ghastly kind of inn is there built up to a climax which
blasts all hopes of domestic coziness by the revelation that its landlord is a
‘Necromancer,’ a sorcerer who communicates with spirits.
In the poem under consideration, however, the house of death so lightly sketched is not
her destination. That is clearly stated as ‘Eternity,’ though it is significant that
she never reaches it. . . . An eminent critic, after praising this as a remarkably
beautiful poem, complains that it breaks down at this point because it goes beyond the
‘Limits of Judgment’; in so far as it attempts to experience death and express the nature
of posthumous beatitude, he says, it is ‘fraudulent.’ /224/ But in addition to being a
hyper-rational criticism, this is simply a failure to read the text. The poem does not in
the least strive after the incomprehensible. It deals with the daily realization of the
imminence of death, offset by man’s yearning for immortality. These are intensely felt,
but only as ideas, as the abstractions of time and eternity, not as something experienced.
Being essentially inexpressible, they are rendered as metaphors. The idea of achieving
immortality by a ride in the carriage of death is confronted by the concrete fact of
physical disintegration as she pauses before a ‘Swelling in the Ground.’
The final stanza is not an extension of knowledge beyond the grave but simply the most
fitting coda for her poem. In projecting the last sensations of consciousness as the world
fades out, she has employed progressively fewer visible objects until with fine dramatic
skill she limits herself at the end to a single one, the ‘Horses Heads,’ recalled in a
flash of memory as that on which her eyes had been fixed throughout the journey. These
bring to mind the ‘Carriage’ of the opening stanza, and Death, who has receded as a
person, is now by implication back in the driver’s seat. ‘Since then—’tis Centuries,’
she says, in an unexpected phrase for the transition from time to eternity, but this is a
finite infinity; her consciousness is still operative and subject to temporal measurement.
All of this poetically elapsed time ‘Feels shorter than the Day,’ the day of death brought
to an end by the setting sun of the third stanza, when she first guessed the direction in
which these apocalyptic horses were headed. ‘Surmised,’ carefully placed near the
conclusion, is all the warranty one needs for reading this journey as one that has taken
place entirely in her mind, ‘imagined without certain knowledge,’ as her Lexicon defined
it. The last word may be ‘Eternity’ but it is strictly limited by the directional
preposition ‘toward.’ So the poem returns to the very day, even the same instant, when it
started. Its theme is a Christian one, yet unsupported by any of the customary rituals and
without any final statement of Christian faith. The resolution is not mystical but
dramatic.
Read in this way the poem is flawless to the last detail, each image precise and
discrete even while it is unified in the central motif of the last journey. Yet another
level of meaning has suggested itself faintly to two critics. One has described the driver
as ‘amorous but genteel’; the other has noted ‘the subtly interfused erotic motive,’ love
having frequently been an idea linked with death for the romantic poets. Both of these
astute guesses were made without benefit of the revealing /245/ fourth stanza, recently
restored from the manuscript. But even in the well-known opening lines of the poem there
are suggestive hints for anyone who remembers that the carriage drive was a standard mode
of courtship a century ago. In the period of her normal social life, when Emily Dickinson
took part ill those occasions that give youthful love its chance, she frequently went on
drives with young gentlemen. Some ten years before the date of this poem, for example, she
wrote to her brother: ‘I’ve been to ride twice since I wrote you, . . . last evening with
Sophomore Emmons, alone’; and a few weeks later she confided to her future sister-in-law:
‘I’ve found a beautiful, new, friend.’ The figure of such a prospective suitor would
inevitably have come to the minds of a contemporary audience as they read: ‘He kindly
stopped for me— / The Carriage held but just Ourselves. . . .’ Such a young couple
likewise would have driven beyond the village limits into the open country and then,
romantically, past the ‘Setting Sun.’ Restraint kept her from pushing this parallel to the
point of being ludicrous, and the suitor image quickly drops into the background.
The love-death symbolism, however, re-emerges with new implications in the now restored
fourth stanza, probably omitted by previous editors because they were baffled by its
meaning:
For only Gossamer, my gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—
This is certainly not a description of conventional burial clothes. It is instead a
bridal dress, but of a very special sort. ‘Gossamer’ in her day was not yet applied to
fine spun cloth but only to that filmy substance like cobwebs sometimes seen floating in
the autumn air, as her Lexicon described it, probably formed by a species of spider. This
brings to mind her cryptic poem on the spider whose web was his ‘Strategy of Immortality.’
And by transforming the bridal veil into a ‘Tippet,’ the flowing scarf-like part of the
distinctive hood of holy orders, she is properly dressed for a celestial marriage.
‘Death,’ to be sure, is not the true bridegroom but a surrogate, which accounts for his
minor role. He is the envoy taking her on this curiously premature wedding journey to the
heavenly altar where she will be married to God. The whole idea of the Bride-of-the-Lamb
is admittedly only latent in the text of this poem, but in view of the body of her
writings it seems admissible to suggest it as another metaphor for the extension of
meanings. . . . /246/
‘Because I could not stop for Death’ is incomparably the finest poem of this cluster.
In it all the traditional modes are subdued so they can, be assimilated to her purposes.
For her theme there, as a final reading of its meaning will suggest, is not necessarily
death or immortality in the literal sense of those terms. There are many ways of dying, as
she once said:
Death—is but one—and comes but once—
And only nails the eyes—
[#561—Poems,
1896, pp. 47-48]
One surely dies out of this world in the end, but one may also die away from the world
by deliberate choice during this life. In her vocabulary ‘immortal’ is a value that can
also attach to living this side of the grave:
Some—Work for Immortality—
The Chiefer part, for Time—
[#406—Further
Poems, 1929, p. 5]
As an artist she ranked herself with that elite. At the time of her dedication to
poetry, presumably in the early 1860’s, someone ‘kindly stopped’ for her—lover, muse,
God—and she willingly put away the labor and leisure of this world for the creative
life of the spirit. Looking back on the affairs of ‘Time’ at any point after making such a
momentous deci- /248/ sion, she could easily feel ‘Since then—’tis Centuries—’
Remembering what she had renounced, the happiness of a normal youth, sunshine and growing
things, she could experience a momentary feeling of deprivation. But in another sense she
had simply triumphed over them, passing beyond earthly trammels. Finally, this makes the
most satisfactory reading of her reversible image of motion and stasis during the journey,
passing the setting sun and being passed by it. For though in her withdrawal the events of
the external world by-passed her, in the poetic life made possible by it she escaped the
limitations of the mortal calendar. She was borne confidently, by her winged horse,
‘toward Eternity’ in the immortality of her poems. /249/
from Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, Inc., 1960), pp. 241-246 and 248-249.
Sharon Cameron
Yvor Winters has spoken of the poem’s subject as "the daily
realization of the imminence of death—it is a poem of departure from life, an
intensely conscious leave-taking." But in its final claim to actually experience
death, Winters has found it fraudulent. There is, of course, a way out of or around the
dilemma of posthumous speech and that is to suppose that the entire ride with death is, as
the last stanza indicates, a "surmise," and " ’tis Centuries—," a
colloquial hyperbole. But we ought not insist that the poem’s interpretation pivot on the
importance of this word. For we ignore its own struggle with extraordinary claims if we
insist too quickly on its adherence to traditional limits.
In one respect, the speaker’s assertions that she "could not stop for
Death—" must be taken as the romantic protest of a self not yet disabused of the
fantasy that her whims, however capricious, will withstand the larger temporal demands of
the external world. Thus the first line, like any idiosyncratic representation of the
world, must come to grips with the tyranny of more general meanings, not the least of
which can be read in the inviolable stand of the universe, every bit as willful as the
isolate self. But initially the world seems to cater to the self’s needs; since the
speaker does not have time (one implication of "could not stop") for death, she
is deferred to by the world ("He kindly stopped for me—"). In another
respect, we must see the first line not only as willful (had not time for) but also as the
admission of a disabling fact (could not). The second line responds to the doubleness of
conception. What, in other words, in one context is deference, in another is coercion, and
since the poem balances tonally between these extremes it is important to note the
dexterity with which they are compacted in the first two lines.
There is, of course, further sense in which death stops for the speaker, and that is in
the fusion I alluded to earlier between interior and exterior senses of time, so that the
consequence of the meeting in the carriage is the death of otherness. The poem presumes to
rid death of its otherness, to familiarize it, literally to adopt its perspective and in
so doing to effect a synthesis between self and other, internal time and the faster, more
relentless beat of the world. Using more traditional terms to describe the union, Allen
Tate speaks of the poem’s "subtly interfused erotic motive, which the idea of death
has presented to most romantic poets, love being a symbol interchangeable with