Looking Back from Eternity

Dickinson’s ‘Because I could not stop for Death’

Mar 9, 2007

Emily Dickinson, in her poem of cosmic drama, portrays Death as a gentleman carriage driver, for whom she ceases her leisure as well as her work.

Musing Back

Poets often look back to their childhood to muse upon an occasion that held a special meaning, such as Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” and Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” When Dickinson’s speaker looks back in “Because I could not stop for Death,” she is not simply looking at a childhood memory; she is looking back from beyond the earthly existence from her spiritual level of existence in eternity.

Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” consists of six four-line stanzas with an irregular rime scheme and irregular meter.

First Stanza – “He kindly stopped for me”

In the opening stanza, the speaker makes the startling claim that she simply “could not stop for Death”; however, Death could stop for her, and he politely did so. Then the speaker startles the reader again by making what might seem to be an outlandish remark: “The Carriage held but just Ourselves — / And Immortality.” The reader sees the speaker riding a horse-drawn carriage with a kind, polite gentleman who has stopped for her, and they are riding alone in the carriage, except for a third presence, “Immortality.” The reader is only four lines into the poem and yet realizes that this speaker is dramatizing a wildly unusual buggy ride.

Second Stanza – Putting away her labor and leisure

The speaker then describes the situation further: they carriage occupants are traveling slowly. She had ceased working, which the reader would expect of one who has died, and now is accompanying a gentleman on a leisurely carriage ride, but this speaker quickly asserts that she ceased her leisure also, and she gave up these things easily because this gentleman caller was so kind and gracious.

Third Stanza – Life passing before one’s eyes

In the third stanza, the speaking describes the passing landscape as she and Gentleman Death accompanied only by Immortality proceed on their carriage ride: she sees children play in a schoolyard; she sees a field of ripe wheat or corn, and then she sees a sunset. No doubt, Dickinson deliberately chose these particular images to represent three stages of life—childhood, adulthood, and old age. The reader is also reminded of the claim that during the process of the soul leaving the body, one sees one’s “life pass before one’s eyes.”

Fourth Stanza – “Or rather — He passed Us”

Again, the speaker startles the reader, by quickly reversing her claim that the carriage riders passed the setting sun; it appears that the sun actually passed the riders. And without further comment about the reversal, the speaker claims that a certain frigidness engulfed her as the air turned cold and dew began to form. And she was so lightly dressed in thin gauze-like gown and lace shawl.

Fifth Stanza – A house in the ground

The fifth stanza turns out to hold the most ominous description of the poem as the carriage ride seems to end at a grave, which the speaker dramatizes as “A Swelling of the Ground — / The Roof was scarcely visible — / The Cornice — in the Ground.”

Sixth Stanza – The Horses’ Heads leading to Eternity

The sixth stanza, however, places the speaker centuries into the future, and then the reader realizes that she is speaking from her cosmic home in eternity. She has simply recounted the day she died, the things she so briefly saw all those centuries ago, and the time period in which she saw those things now seems “shorter than a day.” In her cosmic home, time is experienced very differently from earth time: what is centuries in earth time seems shorter than a day to one experiencing cosmic time or “eternity.”

Readers first encountering this poem are tempted to ignore the subtle hints that remove this poem from an earthly setting, but by the end of stanza six, the speaker has made it clear that Immortality, that third rider in the carriage was more real than all of the earthly images she had experienced that day, because “the Horses' Heads / Were toward Eternity.”