Emily Dickinson holds a special place in the firmament of American writers. Although she lived in the 19th century and seldom left her home region in Massachusetts, her poetry speaks to readers of all ages and backgrounds. Dickinson possessed a singular poetic style, characterized by inventive punctuation, powerful efficiency, and deep inquiry of the human experience. Her poem “Because I could not stop for Death” has become a touchstone for readers encountering Dickinson for the first time.

Editor Ralph W. Franklin, who compiled the now-definitive edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in 1998, places “Because I could not stop for Death” at number 479 in his chronological sequence of the poet’s work. (An earlier compilation numbered the poem at 712.) This poem transforms the typical imagery associated with end of life in Dickinson’s day into a dreamy and somewhat secular meditation on death, time, and the human soul. This poem also features the meter and rhyme scheme common in Christian hymns.

Poet Biography

Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886. She spent her life at her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. As a young woman, in addition to schoolwork, Dickinson performed domestic duties and social calls on behalf of her family. She also attended a Calvinist church with her family in the early years of her life, although she often expressed religious skepticism. Though she lived during the Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction, she remained largely homebound during these years so her work does not overtly reflect this tumultuous historical moment. A handful of her poems were published during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s family play an important role in New England history. Nearly two hundred years before her birth, Dickinson’s ancestors traveled to America from England in 1630 with John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dickinson’s father was a Congressman, and in 1854, in response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Edward Dickinson and a group of other Congressmen created a new political party called the Republican party.

Emily Dickinson’s literary contemporaries include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Dickinson apparently revered the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, but her library did not include works by Walt Whitman, one of her foremost peers in the canon of American literature.

After Dickinson’s death, her family discovered the nearly 1,800 poems she left behind. An 1890 edition of her selected poems, although popular with critics and readers, failed to capture the quirks of Dickinson’s style by eliding the many dashes and irregular capitalizations featured in the poet’s manuscripts. It wasn’t until 1955 that these original features were restored in published versions of Dickinson’s work.

Poem Text

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death.” 1890. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem’s speaker meets a carriage on the road. It stops, and she climbs aboard to meet its driver, Death, and another passenger, Immortality. The carriage gently makes its way along the road as the speaker considers the work and pleasure she has put to rest for the sake of this new journey.

The carriage passes children playing in a schoolyard, as well as fields of crops. The sun sets as they continue. The speaker grows cold and realizes how thin her clothes are.

The final stanza reveals that although the speaker experienced these events centuries ago, it feels like less than a day has passed. The carriage stops beside “a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground —” (Lines 17-18). The house is situated so far in the earth that the speaker can barely see the roof. The speaker realizes that the carriage has been traveling toward “Eternity —” (Line 24).