The second, third and fourth lines tie in perfectly with the first two lines of the poem:
she who has not been able to stop for Death is now so completely captivated by his
personality that she has put away everything that had occupied her before his coming.
The third stanza contains a series of heterogeneous materials: children, gazing grain,
setting sun. But under the poet’s skillful treatment these materials, seemingly foreign to
one another, are fused into a unit and reconciled. How? Not, obviously, by simply setting
them side by side, but by making them all parts of a single order of perception. They are
all perceived as elements in an experience from which the onlooker has withdrawn. In its
larger meaning this experience is Nature, over which, with the aid of death, the
individual triumphs. "Gazing grain," shifting "gazing" from the dead
woman who is passing to a common feature of Nature at which she is astonished, gives the
grain something of the fixity of death itself, although the grain is alive. /586/ This
paradox is highly significant in the context of the poem: "grain" symbolizes
life, mortality; "gazing" suggests death, immortality. "Setting sun"
is no less powerful in its suggestion of the passage of time; and "the school where
children played, / Their lessons scarcely done" makes a subtle preparation for it.
In the next stanza the house, appearing as a "swelling of the ground," the
roof "scarcely visible" and the cornice, "but a mound," suggest the
grave, a sinking out of sight. "Paused" calls to mind the attitude of the living
toward the lowering of a coffin into the ground, as well as other associations with the
occurrence of death.
"Centuries" in the last stanza refers, of course, to eternity. "Each
feels shorter than the day" ties in with "setting sun" in the third stanza
and suggests at the same time the timelessness of eternity. Indeed, an effective contrast
between the time of mortality and the timelessness of eternity is made in the entire
stanza.
"Horses’ heads" is a concrete extension of the figure of the carriage, which
is maintained throughout the poem. The carriage is headed toward eternity, where Death is
taking the passenger. The attitude of withdrawal, or seeing with perspective, could not
have been more effectively accomplished than it has been by the use of the slowly-moving
carriage. Remoteness is fused with nearness, for the objects that are observed during the
journey are made to appear close by. At the same time, a constant moving forward, with
only one pause, carries weighty implications concerning time, death, eternity. The person
in the carriage is viewing things that are near with the perspective of distance, given by
the presence of Immortality.
The poem could hardly be said to convey an idea, as such, or a series of ideas;
instead, it presents a situation in terms of human experience. The conflict between
mortality and immortality is worked out through the agency of metaphor and tone. The
resolution of the conflict lies in the implications concerning the meaning of eternity:
not an endless stretch of time, but something fixed and timeless, which interprets and
gives meaning to /587/ mortal experience. Two seemingly contradictory concepts, mortality
and immortality, are reconciled, because several seemingly contradictory elements which
symbolize them are brought into reconciliation.
The interaction of elements within a poem to produce an effect of reconciliation in the
poem as a whole, which we have observed in these analyses, is the outstanding
characteristic of "Metaphysical" poetry. This poetry Cleanth Brooks defines as
that in which "the opposition of the impulses which are united is extreme" or,
again, that "in which the poet attempts the reconciliation of qualities which are
opposite or discordant in the extreme." I have no intention of forcing this
classification upon the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Indeed, I have no intention of forcing
any classification upon her; I have tried to focus more upon the mechanics of her poetry.
It seems fairly clear however, . . . that she is free from the limitations of the romantic
poet, which she is generally mistaken to be. She does not employ metaphor only for
illustration or decoration of some "truth," as the romantic poet usually does.
She does not merely introduce an element of paradox, as the romantic poet tends to
do; rather she succeeds in bringing it to the surface and in reconciling seemingly
contradictory concepts. She does not use disparate materials sparingly and put them down
in juxtaposition without blending them, as the romantic poet is often inclined to do. And
her liberty in the use of words would hardly be sanctioned by the typically romantic poet,
for fear of being "unpoetic" and not "great" and
"beautiful."
The kind of unity, or reconciliation that we have been observing at work in these poems
is chiefly responsible for their success. Proof of this is found in the fact that the few
poems of Emily Dickinson’s that are not successful show no evidence of the quality; and
some others that are only partially successful show less of it. In this sense we are
justified in referring to Emily Dickinson as a metaphysical poet. /588/
from "Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: A Revaluation," The Sewanee Review,
LI (Autumn, 1943), 585-588.
RICHARD CHASE
Emily Dickinson’s poems on death are scattered in clusters through the two volumes
which contain her poetic works. Drawn together in one of the several orders that suggest
themselves, they constitute a small body of poems equal to the most distinguished lyric
verse in English.
She is surely unparalleled in capturing the experience of New England deathbed scenes
and funerals. Of this kind the three best poems are "How many times these low feet
staggered," "I heard a fly buzz when I died," and "I felt a funeral in
my brain." Her most successful device in these poems is her juxtaposition of the
sense of the mys- /246/ tery of death with the sense of particular material stresses,
weights, motions, and sounds so that each clarifies and intensifies the other:
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
[#280—Poems,
1896, p. 168]
Few other writers have expressed such astonishing loneliness as this.
The objection has been made that no poet ought to imagine that he has died and that he
knows exactly what the experience is like. The objection does not apply, at any rate, to
"I heard a fly buzz," since the poem does not in the least strive after the
unknowable but deals merely with the last sensations of consciousness. . . . /247/
[The differing versions] remind the reader of the textual difficulties in the Dickinson
canon which are still to be cleared up. "I heard a fly buzz" has again and again
been reprinted in the altered version of the early Todd Higginson editions. This version
substitutes "round my form" for "in the room" (second line),
preferring an insipidity to an imperfect rhyme. It reads "The eyes beside"
instead of "The eyes around," substitutes "sure" for "firm,"
and says in place of "witnessed in the room," "witnessed in his
power." Both "sure" and "power" have generalized moralistic and
honorific connotations which Higginson and Mrs. Todd thought (perhaps rightly) would be
more pleasing to late Victorian readers than the poet’s more precise, concrete words.
These editors left the fourth stanza intact but wrote the third stanza thus:
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable—and then
There interposed a fly.
[#465—Poems,
1896, p. 184]
To gain a rhyme, that is, they did not scruple to add the gratuitous and poetically
neutral "Could make" and to sacrifice the voiced "s" sound which the
poet had provided in "It was." Higginson and Mrs. Todd did not publish this poem
at all until Poems, Third Series, in 1896. This leads one to conjecture that they
thought it unusually awkward in its versification and that, consequently, when they did
get around to publishing it, they edited it with unusually free hands. These are questions
which can be an- /248/ swered only by the much desired definitive edition of Emily
Dickinson’s work.
Of the several poems which describe death as a gentleman visitor or lover the most
familiar is also incomparably the best ["Because I could not stop for Death"]. .
. . The only pressing technical objection to this poem is the remark that
"Immortality" in the first stanza is a meretricious and unnecessary
personification and that the common sense of the situation demands that Immortality ought
to be the destination of the coach and not one of the /249/ passengers. The
personification of death, however, is unassailable. In the literal meaning of the poem, he
is apparently a successful citizen who has amorous but genteel intentions. He is also God.
And though as a genteel citizen, his "civility" may be a little hollow—or
even a confidence trick—as God his "civility" is that hierarchic status
which he confers upon the poet and for which she gladly exchanges the labor and leisure of
the less brilliant life she has been leading.
The word "labor" recalls Emily Dickinson’s idea that life is to be understood
as the slow labor of dying; now this labor is properly put away. So is the leisure, since
a far more desirable leisure will be hers in "eternity." The third stanza is a
symbolic recapitulation of life: the children playing, wrestling (more "labor")
through the cycle of their existence, "in a ring"; the gazing grain signifies
ripeness and the entranced and visionary gaze that first beholds the approach of death of
which the setting sun is the felicitous symbol.
The last two stanzas are hardly surpassed in the whole range of lyric poetry. The
visual images here are handled with perfect economy. All the poem needs is one or two
concrete images—roof, cornice—to awake in our minds the appalling identification
of house with grave. Even more compelling is the sense of pausing, and the sense of
overpowering action and weight in "swelling" and "mound." This
kinaesthetic imagery prepares us for the feeling of suddenly discerned motion in the last
stanza, which with fine dramatic tact presents us with but one visual image, the horses’
heads. There are progressively fewer visible objects in the last three stanzas, since the
seen world must be /250/ made gradually to sink into the nervously sensed world—a
device the poet uses to extraordinary effect in the last stanza of "I heard a fly
buzz." /251/
from Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1939.
THOMAS H. JOHNSON
. . . In 1863 Death came into full stature as a person. "Because I could not stop
for Death" is a superlative achievement wherein Death becomes one of the great
characters of literature.
It is almost impossible in any critique to define exactly the kind of reality which her
character Death attains, simply because the protean shifts of form are intended to
forestall definition. A poem can convey the nuances of exultation, agony, compassion, or
any mystical mood. But no one can successfully define mysticism because the logic of
language has no place for it. One must therefore assume that the reality of Death, as
Emily Dickinson conceived him, is to be perceived by the reader in the poems themselves.
Any analysis can do no more than suggest what may be looked for .
In "Because I could not stop for Death" Emily Dickinson envisions Death as a
person she knew and trusted, or believed that she could trust. He might be any Amherst
gentleman, a William Howland or an Elbridge Bowdoin, or any of the coming lawyers or
teachers or ministers whom she remembered from her youth, with whom she had exchanged
valentines, and who at one time or another had acted as her squire. . . . /222/ The
carriage holds but the two of them, yet the ride, as she states with quiet emphasis, is a
last ride together. Clearly there has been no deception on his part. They drive in a
leisurely manner, and she feels completely at ease. Since she understands it to be a last
ride, she of course expects it to be unhurried. Indeed, his graciousness in taking time to
stop for her at that point and on that day in her life when she was so busy she could not
possibly have taken time to stop for him, is a mark of special politeness. She is
therefore quite willing to put aside her work. And again, since it is to be her last ride,
she can dispense with her spare moments as well as her active ones. . . .
She notes the daily routine of the life she is passing from. Children playing games
during a school recess catch her eye at the last. And now the sense of motion is
quickened. Or perhaps more exactly one should say that the sense of time comes to an end
as they pass the cycles of the day and the seasons of the year, at a period of both
ripeness and decline. . . . How insistently "passed" echoes through the [third]
stanza! She now conveys her feeling of being outside time and change, for she corrects
herself to say that the sun passed them, as it of course does all who are in the grave.
She is aware of dampness and cold, and becomes suddenly conscious of the sheerness of the
dress and scarf which she now discovers that she wears. . . . /223/
The two concluding stanzas, with progressively decreasing concreteness, hasten the
final identification of her "House." It is the slightly rounded surface "of
the Ground," with a scarcely visible roof and a cornice "in the Ground." To
time and seasonal change, which have already ceased, is now added motion. Cessation of all
activity and creativeness is absolute. At the end, in a final instantaneous flash of
memory, she recalls the last objects before her eyes during the journey: the heads of the
horses that bore her, as she had surmised they were doing from the beginning,
toward—it is the last word—"Eternity." . . . Gradually, too, one
realizes that Death as a person has receded into the background, mentioned last only
impersonally in the opening words "We paused" of the fifth stanza, where his
services as squire and companion are over. In this poem concrete realism melds into
"awe and circumference" with matchless economy. /224/
from Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University, 1955), pp. 222-224.
THEODORE C. HOEPFNER
A comment by Richard Chase on Emily Dickinson’s "Because I Could not stop for
Death," reads in part as follows:
The only pressing technical objection to this poem is the remark that
"Immortality" in the first stanza is a meretricious and unnecessary
personification and that the common sense of the situation demands that Immortality ought
to be the destination of the coach and not one of the passengers. The personification of
death, however, is unassailable. In the literal meaning of the poem, he is apparently a
successful citizen who has amorous but genteel intentions. He is also God. . . .
The trouble with this remark is that it does not present the common sense of the
situation. Emily Dickinson was taught Christian doctrine—not simply Christian
morality but Christian theology—and she knew that the coach cannot head toward
immortality, nor can one of the passengers. Dickinson here compresses two related but
differing concepts: (1) at death the soul journeys to heaven (eternity), and thus the
image of the carriage and driver is appropriate; and (2) the soul is immortal, and our
immortality, therefore, "rides" always with us as a copassenger; it is with us
because the soul is our immortal part and so may be thought of as journeying with us. The
poet’s language is compact and oblique, but there is no false personification in it. Since