Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death

An Epic Journey and American Spiritualism

Feb 16, 2009 Savannah Schroll Guz

The speaker in "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" details the gentility of an anthropomorphized Death, who takes her on a carriage ride through life and beyond.

Comprised of six quatrains, the poem is inconsistent in its rhyme scheme and meter, a trait characteristic of Dickinson’s free and idiosyncratically punctuated poetry. However, quatrains 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 contain an ABCB rhyme scheme. Quatrains 1, 5, and 6 boast exact rhymes, while 2 and 4 feature a slant rhyme. Quatrain 3 contains the approximated, but definition-defying slant rhyme of ‘ring’ and ‘sun.’

Quatrain One: Chivalrous Death

The poem’s first four-line stanza begins with a reference to Death’s chivalrous humanity. The speaker, too busy to drop her responsibilities to meet him herself, is picked up by Death in a carriage. Immortality, which the reader may imagine as a similarly anthropomorphized figure, travels in the carriage with them.

Quatrain Two: A Slow Pace

Dickinson’s speaker indicates that the carriage’s pace is slow. Having relinquished her labor and leisure activities for the ride, she gives her respectful host her full attention.

Quatrain Three: An Encapsulated Life Journey

Out the carriage windows, Dickinson’s speaker views children at school and at play. As they progress, she sees fields of grain, which stand ready for harvest. Finally, they pass the setting sun. Here, Dickinson employs the greatest amount of symbolism, and encapsulates a life’s journey in four lines: the children are an obvious reference to childhood; the “gazing grain” alludes to maturity; and the setting sun refers to the evening of life.

Quatrain Four: An Oblique Reference to Spiritualism

Following on the heels of stanza three, where the speaker notes that the carriage passed the sun, she corrects herself and clarifies that the sun actually passed them--possibly indicating that they have stopped moving. The speaker may now be in one place: underground, over which the sun daily passes. The next three lines are more symbolically abstract, referring to chilling dews and a gown made of the gauzy fabric known as tulle. A plausible interpretation may be that the speaker has left the corporeal world and moved into the spirit world, with all its cool and insubstantial disembodiment. Or once interred in light garments, her physical form feels the chill of the earth outside the coffin.

Quatrain Five

In this stanza, the speaker stands before her new home, which she refers to by using more literal architectural terms: a house, a scarcely visible roof, a nearly buried cornice. Here, she describes her new grave. The swelling of the ground is the newly filled hole, whose contents have not yet settled. Depending on the version printed, ‘ground’ sometimes replaces the word ‘mound’. And with this use of Dickinson's original language, the cornice and scarcely visible roof reference, more clearly, the head stone.

Quatrain Six

Once deleted by book editors, this stanza lightens the poem’s mood and seems to underscore Dickinson’s intended theme: entombment is not the end. Initially, the carriage that stopped for her contained both Death and Immortality. By the final stanza, Immortality becomes not another rider, but a destination to which the horses pulling the carriage are pointed. Dickinson indicates, through her speaker, that Immortality brings a different conception and experience of time, as the speaker closes with the idea that centuries have passed since she entered that carriage and confronted her own grave mound. Yet, it feels like little more than a day.

The Poem in a Broader Context: American Spiritualism

A potential influence on this poem is the American Spiritualist movement, which reached its peak in the 1860s and 70s, the decades before Dickinson’s death. Along with Spiritualism came spirit photographs, where an insubstantial ghostly figure -- often the work of double exposures and other darkroom tricks -- appeared in photographs of loved ones, providing comforting evidence of the soul’s immortality. Although a recluse who rarely left her own room in later years, Dickinson is said to have been aware of such daguerreotypes. Dickinson scholars like Dr. Marta L. Werner assert that poems like the c. 1865 “The Soul's distinct connection” specifically address the subject.

The copyright of the article Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death in Poetry is owned by Savannah Schroll Guz. Permission to republish Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Moses A. Dow, Editor of Waverley Magazine, with th