I have not had much time for leisure lately between moving states, school, being a dad, and so forth. But I did want to share a small paper I wrote for an English course, I think it might be an enjoyable read for some. Emily Dickinson has become my favorite poet and I just wanted to pay some homage to her.

The Depth of Love and Light in a Grave

 By some estimates, Emily Dickinson directly addresses death in over 250 poems; capitalizing the term “death” in every single one, (McNaughton, 203). The finality of things was something that haunted Dickinson, but in complicated ways. It came to her as a “certain slant of light,” to be sure, but as a light in which she somehow found all the colors of the sun. One way of articulating this spectrum is by separating Dickinson’s poems on death based on whether they poeticize the physicality of the death, the pageantry of death, the grave itself, or immortality, (McNaughton, 208). Another way is looking at things is not by how Dickinson poeticizes death, but why. In this paper, three such reasons will be considered and discerned in a literary analysis of one of Dickinson’s paradigmatic treatments of death: “Because I could not stop for Death.” We shall discover that Dickinson interacts with death from at least three different perspectives: as a metaphysician, a comedian, and a lover.

Published in 1890 under the title “The Chariot,” what we know of now as “Because I could not stop for Death” is something of a quiet reverie of a time with death, drifting across 24 lines of saudade woven in quatrain. Death is personified in almost courtly terms as accompanying Dickinson by carriage throughout life. There is no buzzing of flies here, nothing grotesque or vulgar, only the gentle images of a passing life—children at recess, a setting sun. The sequence itself could symbolize the funeral procession, and so poeticize the pageantry of death. And the penultimate quatrain does speak of her grave as a residence. But it is not a house that she dwells in, and there is no romanization of the act of dying—such as if her courtier had carried her into the new home, or laid her there before kissing her farewell. The home is instead for her body, while she is merely meant to part ways with it.

“Because I could not stop for Death” thus fits into three of McNaughton’s categories, and this should be a testament to Dickinson’s capacity as a demiurge of language. But, although she poeticizes death from many angles in the text, why does she do so? Three proposals are to be explored here. First, Dickinson is painting through words a vision of the metaphysics of death. Such a perspective is less phenomenological and so time-bound than it is abstract, and so what we might call “everpresent.” Second, Dickinson is smiling at the thought of what is otherwise a terrifying and inexorable immensity. From this point of view, there is something almost dear, or charming about the sheer preposterousness of there being a propriety to one’s extinction. Lastly, Dickinson touches an erotic nerve within the experience of death. He is not a monster, clawing at some prey with lifeless fingers, but a “supple suitor,” as she elsewhere describes him, wooing her across an eternal embrace.

In the first place, then, let us meet Dickinson the metaphysician. As T.S. Elliot once said, “the end is where we start from,” (Little Gidding, V), and it is in the final stanzas of “Because I could not stop for Death” that Dickinson begins her metaphysical work on death. This work can be divided between the theoretical and the practical. As a theoretician, it is at the end of our poem that she describes in something like a future perfect tense her death as having passed centuries ago. What then is death, and where is its sting? Dickinson unveils in these lines an angle from which death is not the terminus of the vital procession, but its companion. On the other hand, as a practical metaphysician, Dickinson employs formal writing techniques as a means to immortalize her vision. Through these techniques, Dickinson appears to have discovered a way to stand outside of time. 

Dickinson is able to do this because, as Shwarz (97) picks up on, she has achieved a fusion between the two Greek concepts of time as propitious moment and time as eternal motion. In other words, she sees time as perspectival: moving and directional in one sense, but also cyclical and so paradoxical. This fusion is captured in arresting images like frozen clocks. Schwarz observes that Dickinson’s syntactical arrangements in “Because I could not stop for Death” produce a meter that mirrors the events she is narrating. As Schwarz puts it, the “galloping of the horses is convincingly made audible in the iambic meter,” (94). That is, she somehow achieves an isomorphism between the rhythmical pattern of the lines, and the objects those lines are describing. On Dickinson’s mastery of time, Schwarz cites Northrop Frye as saying: “If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, at least, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be,” (97). Dickinson harnesses time as a means to her end, and in so doing, transcends time, inviting us to follow behind should we have any hope of seeing what she saw. But her work as a philosopher was not necessarily done with a straight face.

Enter Dickinson the comedian. Elenore Lambert turns her eye to our poem in a broader context of exploring the extent to which Dickinson incorporated humor into her many works. With respect to “Because I Could not stop for Death,” Lambert notices key incongruities throughout the text that may have been intended as a sort of joke. Incongruity is often the premise of comedy, especially where the intention is to reverse expectations by transgressing norms of seriousness. In this way, one catches another off guard, not by unexpectedly being serious, but by not doing so. On this basis, perhaps the presence of incongruity in the text warrants looking for comic intent. Indeed, from this perspective, there is perhaps something humorous about the whole of idea of death not being a morose or frightening grim reaper, but actually a very kind gentleman who chauffeurs one by a rather pleasant carriage ride. What sort of humor might this involve?

One answer is that Dickinson is reversing expectations by means of treating with unusual familiarity or irreverence what is normally considered sacred, or classically tragic. That is, there is an impudence or cheekiness to Dickinson’s treatment of death here. However, it is inherently speculative to psychoanalyze authors, and so impossible to say for certain whether she penned the poem with such a mindset, or whether doing so is unlikely given her more serious general attitudes toward death. But in the realm of speculation, it is entirely possible that Dickinson is speaking more tongue-in-cheek here. That is, she could very well be telling a tale, having a laugh, or perhaps fighting a smile while narrating what death is ‘really’ like. In either case, to test for comic intent, one would look for whether there is here a sort of making light of a very grave matter; a sort of playfulness.

Is it playful or perhaps humorously transgressive to portray death not as some inexorable eclipse of everything one loves, but actually something of a flirt, chauffeuring one on a rather pleasant carriage ride? Reasonably so. Moreover, the very cadence or rhythm of the text is an indication of a whimsical mentality. As Shwarz correctly noted, there is an intended kinesthetic isomorphism throughout the carriage ride, and one can fairly wonder whether there is a playfulness in this accomplishment. That is, one does not go quivering into the darkness, but actually trots along, as it were. However, Lambert locates the humor elsewhere by saying that “if this poem has a ‘joke,’ it is contained in the incongruous use of the word death to indicate eternal life,” (12). Lambert sees this as a dysphemism. Perhaps this particular incongruity is more witty than funny, though. The key to this poem’s comedic properties might instead lie in the flow of the text itself. After all, it is in the fourth quatrain that Dickinson shifts perspectives and begins to speak of a chill. That is, the poem is naturally divided into halves of which the second is marked by taking a more serious turn, which implies that it follows from something more lighthearted. Could this be the punchline to a dark sense of humor? Or are there other sources of carefree states of mind?

One alternative is that Dickinson’s mentality here is not following from a sense of humor, but from rose-colored glasses. That is, blitheness sometimes comes from the warmth of romance, which would incidentally contrast well with the chill of the reality experienced in the second half of the poem. Dickinson may have been smiling, but from feeling charmed, in flirtatious silliness that one might envisage on a “date.” With this possibility, we come into contact with Dickinson the lover. She places herself in a very old tradition indeed of portraying death in romantic terms, especially for a young female lover, (cf. Gilbert, 249-250). This suggested reading of the poem is made by Sandra Gilbert, who finds this theme in the larger context of an article exploring erotic or romantic portrayals of death and suicide throughout feminist literature.

She finds romantic tones throughout “Because I could not stop for Death,” and these can be seen to range from more obvious, surface-level things like setting and phraseology to deeper textual elements such as the very structure of the poem itself. Their bond is described in everlasting terms. Not only had death accompanied her along her entire life, but they never parted ways. In stanza 13, the sun passes over both of them, rather than just her. And in stanza 17, the couple “pauses,” rather than part ways. Indeed, Dickinson told us from the start that in the carriage was not only death and herself but immortality. At the end, she says the horses’ heads had been pointed toward eternity. This courtship is thus not a formality, or a means of easing one’s passage. Death is indeed courting Dickinson, but not for some temporary end, such as to ease her passing, or to lure her to her demise, or even to pay homage to her fleeting beauty. Death is not her escort, but her companion. Theirs is an everpresent bond, proceeding without haste and with only occasional pause, not toward any terminus, but always to eternity.

She is dressed lightly, and so vulnerably, but he is not frenzied with lust. Death is hers for life, and accompanies her in dignity and poise. They are in each other’s own little world, and the sun itself comes and goes over head, as if time passes differently for them. Indeed, it will have been as if centuries had passed by the time they reach her body’s grave. They are like magnetic poles, suspended in perfect tension between being attracted to one another in heart but repelled by opposite natures. This is what it is for immortality to ride with them; for them to ceaselessly push and pull in perpetual motion. She is involved in an affair across worlds with death itself.

Emily Dickinson was many things—a Queen indeed, but also a metaphysician, a comedian, and a lover. Textual elements indicate three different authorial intentions in ‘Because I could not stop for Death’. Her manipulation of tense when speaking of death expresses an atemporal vision. Her shift in tone and perspective naturally folds the poem in half and encapsulates an irreverent familiarity with death. Her transgressive intimacy may have come from a sense of humor, or from a sense of love, or even from both. So enraptured in his embrace was she that it is probably pointless to disentangle her smile from whatever aroused it. But whatever she was feeling, looking into his eyes, it is to this day enfolded in the carriage of her poem, carried along across time in the quatrain of a careless four-beat gait.

References     

Elliot, T.S. Four Quartets, Little Gidding. https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20191242/html.php. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.

Gilbert, Sandra M. “The Supple Suitor: Death, Women, Feminism, and (Assisted or Unassisted) Suicide.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 24, no. 2, 2005, pp. 247–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20455236. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.

Lambert, Eleanore Lewis. “Emily Dickinson’s Joke about Death.” Studies in American Humor, no. 27, 2013, pp. 7–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23823978. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.

Schwarz, Claudia. “Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time.” AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, vol. 32, no. 1, 2007, pp. 83–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43025786. Accessed 11 Mar. 2024.