In Emily Dickinson’s characteristic way, her poem ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’ offers a haunting encounter with some of the deepest mysteries and miseries adjacent to human existence.
As one reads the poem, we find the protagonist being taken on a journey, gently against her will, almost as if by a spell—and this feeling continues to grow as the poem progresses. From the opening lines, we understand that ultimately she is heading toward death, which is confirmed in the final stanzas:
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—
What arises amidst the fantastical imagery of being led by horses and horsemen to an unknown destination, with only “gossamer” and “tulle” covering her — reminiscent of traditional folklore ghost imagery — is the inevitability of our final end in death, regardless of how ready we may feel, and regardless of whatever it is we are leaving behind, likely unfinished.
Death does not request our permission, but in a resigned, mysteriously authoritative way, takes us when the time is upon us. We cannot resist its beckoning, even if we feel the reality of our leftover pieces, people, and projects behind us.
“Could not” as an operative phrase is key: we seem incapable of understanding our finitude until it is truly upon us; one thinks also of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” where regret plunges upon the dying and the grieving in an intense final burst. Death places everything in stark relief.
It is the human condition to have a false sense of eternity for our lives here and now.
We seem to believe, in practice, that the party will never end and that everything that is will continue—and this despite knowing definitively there is no escaping, and that every moment is precious and passing.
The Christian makes peace with this inner sense of eternity through an understanding of earthly life as a mere preparation for the truer existence post-death, and Dickinson seems to point to this, although with a strange, matter-of-fact detachment rather than any promised joy of heaven.
This detachment is normative for Dickinson. Her work is consistently covered in a kind of gauze of depressive resignation to the sorrow of life.
Even in passing the children at recess, the imagery isn’t focused on their joy as a shadow or type of heaven, but instead is of the harsh cooling of night and the disappearance of the sun as she passes them, permanently, as well as everything they symbolize.
Eternity, we infer, does not emerge with all of the blinding brightness of permanent light and golden streets promised in Scripture, but seems to leave the main character in a thin nightgown, bleakly submerged in darkness below the earth—not at all unlike how she describes the whispered disappearance under thick of the one who dies for beauty.
The “House” she references is in fact symbolic of a grave, and its tiny protrusion into earth a small, whimpering flag of memory for the perceptive passerby. Dickinson is consumed by the reality of being insignificant and forgotten, despite the the inner vaulted heavens of her inner world she knew to be the truest reality, unrecognized during her life.
There is, of course, immense irony in that Dickinson is one of the most famous poets to have ever lived—one unlikely to ever be forgotten, precisely because of her honest expressions of grief and death. She could hardly have fathomed such a fate while she stuffed away poems in her desk and bedposts—her writing on the subway walls, as it were.
(My own patrimony of songs and poems reside nicely in dusty old hard drives when they haven’t yet seen the light of day, and I have often thought of this as my modern equivalent to Emily’s.)
The reader learns, at the end, that the protagonist is speaking from centuries down into eternity, which seem only to have been less than the day she transitioned out of earthly existence.
The poem is not hopeful; it is resigned.
In a real way, this is Dickinson’s genius: despite her evident sadness and deep melancholy about many things, she has the courage to look at reality and articulate these inner movements of the heart without flinching. One sees this par excellence in her very short poem “There is pain—so utter—“:
There is pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
…
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely–where an open eye–
Would drop Him–Bone by Bone.
While the main need of the human heart in art is for hope and redemption (although never in a cheap form), art that acts as diagnostic and accurately captures common experience of a melancholic inner world serves an important purpose.
Dickinson embodies the latter preeminently.
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