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Emily Dickinson, "[Because I could not stop for Death—]"

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Robert Weisbuch, "A Typology of Death, II: Dickinson in White" (Part I)
from Emily Dickinson's Poetry, University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Earth is a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true
And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
—From Dickinson's first poem

The narrative of death can continue after "knowing" is "finished" only by contemplating that ending within endings. The typology again transforms its terms. After death, the grave; "After great pain, a formal feeling comes—":

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

(341)

The antitype of the grave fulfills two interconnected types. Its psychological type is the aftermath of pain, when the whole physical system goes into a state of paralyzed shock. The pain has been too great, it has burned out the body electric. The entombed, silenced consciousness affords rest, but only the rest of final failure and indifference. "Anguish has but so many throes—," Dickinson once wrote in a note to herself, "then Unconsciousness seals it" (L, p. 922). Time does not expand to timelessness for the living dead; it simply becomes meaningless. All meanings, all aspirations, all duties (a loose translation "Of Ground, or Air, or Ought") become "regardless," indifferent.

Thus the grave houses not only a frozen, unresponsive non-person but also a destructive skepticism. For Dickinson, the grave represents both emotional fatigue and spiritual doubt. But the grave has a beneficent underside. In "I heard a Fly buzz" and "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," knowing stops at the grave. The grave may create and represent doubts, but in doing so it reminded the imagination of its limitations. It pulls back the arm of an overreaching fiction and makes it earn its way. More positively, the grave may not be a final failure at all; the type of anomie may be "outlived" just as "The Dust—connect—and live—" in resurrection (515). "Christ robs the Nest" of death (153); the grave makes a "Tunnel" (1652). The grave and the paralyzed consciousness constitute Dickinson's vision of what Christians have called purgatory and existentialists the void. (Interestingly, Dickinson's grave is at once more otherworldly than the Christian purgatory of lifelike tortures and more existentially real than the existential void.) The purgatorial grave, if permanent, becomes Dickinson's vision of hell, a permanent end to consciousness. And the grave, if only temporary, must yet be passed through; its types of limitation, doubt, and emotional paralysis must be taken into account as qualificatory notes, even if those notes head toward a supreme fiction.

Dickinson's two great visions of the grave have suffered more misreadings than nearly any of the other poems. The first, which frequently has been interpreted as almost excessively pious, is instead a terrifying vision of the grave as a possibly permanent hell. [1] "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" questions the certainty of the Resurrection and thus many of the assumptions on which the later, "immortal" stage of Dickinson's typology rests:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning

And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.

Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle above them—
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence—
Ah, what sagacity perished here!

(216, first version) [2]

This first version of the poem is simple, ironic, and horrifying. Of the first verse, Dickinson's future sister-in-law, Susan, tells her, "I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again." [3]

These are cold saints indeed. Their purity is surpassed only by their deafness to nature. "Alabaster" implies purity but "Chambers suggests ponderous stolidity and the "Rafter of satin," of luxurious warmth, is topped, literally, by the "Roof of stone." [4] They are "Safe," but such safety is hardly desirable, for they are safe only form the splendors of the world—and perhaps, in the words "Morning" and "Noon," from a personal apocalypse and the splendors of paradise. Perhaps the sun is kept out to keep these sleepers from knowing that a cosmic joke has been played on them. In "How dare the robins sing,"

Insulting is the Sun
To him whose mortal light
Beguiled of immortality
Bequeaths him to the night.

(1724)

Here "Sleep the meek members of the resurrection," but why are they sleeping? Why have they not risen? The conclusion of "A long—long sleep" raises these skeptical questions more explicitly:

Was ever idleness like This?
Upon a Bank of Stone
To bask the Centuries away—
Nor once look up—for Noon?

(654)

Mustn't they look up in despair once for the noon that fulfills nature and forms a link with immortality?

The second stanza even more aggressively suggests that these "meek members" have been beguiled. We see the warm and vital world that these sleepers have sacrificed for a hope which remains unfulfilled. The only "stolid" image in nature is the "stolid Ear" of the flower in which the bee babbles—a lovely vegetative stolidity in contrast to the marble deafness of the sleepers. [5] Could it be that the "ignorant cadence" of the "Sweet Birds" is far wiser than the religious sagacity of the ages? The direction in which the poem has tended gives a sarcastic ring to the final line, "Ah, what sagacity perished here!" The line does not mean, "Oh, imagine with respect the great wisdom of those now dead" but "All their wisdom and faith are unavailing here." Another interpretive possibility provides the more brutally ironic paraphrase, "How fortunate that these foolish sages have been silenced, that nature's sounds need compete no longer with theological mumblings." In either case, Dickinson is not denying resurrection so much as she is criticizing pompous statements of its certainty. This particular grave may be an eschatological ending, but it is definitely a cognitive ending; "through a Riddle, at the last— / Sagacity, must go—," and here we see sagacity stranded within that riddle.

The second version of the poem repeats the first stanza almost exactly, [6] but the second stanza becomes more complex in its attitude:

Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—and Dodges—surrender—
Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow—

(second version)

Now we have a vision of life which is as pessimistic as the vision of death. Life seems a pompous and idiotic show, at least when viewed from the grave. The cosmic life cycles on to no apparent purpose while the rich and powerful end their delusion of self-sufficiency in death. The first stanza now may be reinterpreted in two ways. It is possible to see the meek members as secretly better off than the doges. Such is the attitude of another poem:

It is an honorable Thought
And makes One lift One's Hat
As One met sudden Gentlefolk
Upon a daily Street
That We've immortal Place
Though Pyramids decay
And Kingdoms, like the Orchard
Flit Russetly away

(946)

Perhaps now the sleep of the grave pictured in stanza one is merely a confident preparation for immortality, perhaps we have a valuation of the sleepers at the expense of cyclical nature and temporal human life. Perhaps, as Ruth Miller says of the meek members, "it is their inaction that has purpose, in contrast to the forceful active changes but without goal of the non-dead." [7] Perhaps, but such a reading neglects too much. Even the gloss we employed to support this reading is problematic, for the idea of an immortality simplistically contrasted to life is framed as quaint and gentlemanly—honorable, a nice way to look at things, but perhaps not quite true. More directly, there simply is no sense in which the sleepers of the first stanza appear purposive; the stanza's irony cannot be dismissed. And though we have no direct statement of Dickinson's intention in the revision, a subsequent revision of the question, "Is this frostier?" The version of the second stanza which we are now considering is not designed to soften the poem's critique of faith but to increase the poem's vision of despair. The revised poem is designed to make both life and death condemn themselves and each other. The dynamic crescents, arcs, dynasties, and firmaments stress, by contrast, death's finality. In the more explicit language of another poem, "All but Death, can be adjusted"; "Dynasties" may be repaired or "Citadels—dissolved," but "Death—unto itself—Exception— / Is exempt from Change—" (749). The sleepers of the first stanza appear even more granite-like in contrast to the revised second stanza. And yet life comes off poorly too. Impersonal cosmic space is the cold setting for furious and futile human desires. The humility of the "meek members" implicitly criticizes the "Doges" and in any case, as "Diadems and Doges drop," the royalty become members of this meek group. In fact, the only pretty image in the entire revision is the final line's description of silent destruction. No other poem Dickinson ever wrote toys more intimately with nihilism than this revision.

The final nomination of a second stanza could be no frostier, but it is more pointed in its critique of faith. [8] Life is not judged here at all, except as that sunny springtime from which death is locked out.

Springs—shake the Sills—
But—the Echoes—stiffen—
Hoar—is the Window—and numb—the Door—
Tribes of Eclipse—in Tents of Marble—
Staples of Ages—have buckled here.

(third version)

The grave stiffens and silences all dynamic and evocative phenomena. The faithful who are contained in these "Tents of Marble" deserve their eclipsed fate, at least epistemologically. Dickinson writes to Higginson of her family, "They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their 'Father'" (L 261). Those who take too-easy consolation from a hidden but confidently assumed presence may find themselves finally within the eclipse, for all past wisdom, "Staples of Ages," are themselves stapled, "buckled" together in defeat at the grave. The brush with nihilism in the second version is averted in this final version only by an all-out attack on fatuous faiths. Dickinson is willing to admit that the traditional faith is an "honorable Thought," the "Gentlefolk" of speculation, but she questions whether it will not collapse "when overwhelmed to know""

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

(185)

If Dickinson is unwilling to grant Christian faith an authority any greater than her own typology, she is equally hard on her invention. "Because I could not stop for Death" (712) stands alongside Whitman's "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" as a prime example of self-correction in American poetry. Once again, speculation will be made to "pause" by the grave, but first it is "stopped for" by death itself:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

The first few lines create the same range of ambiguity we found in "I felt a funeral, in my Brain." In their simplest sense, the opening lines say that the living cannot will themselves to die, they must be "stopped for" if they are to stop. But there is another sense in which the lines can be taken. Dickinson is fond of naming in letters what her ever expanding thought cannot stop for. For instance, in reference to mockery she writes, "Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that—My Business is Circumference—" (L 268). In our poem, the persona's thought cannot stop for death, or would not, but the thought of death will stop for her. Again, Dickinson is erasing the distinctions between type and antitype, in this case between thinking about death and its physical realization. And, again, the resultant terror is expressed in totally collected language, so cool in tone that it italicizes the fear it pretends to repress. The developing analogy of an amatory carriage ride with the gentlemanly suitor Death is secretly fraught with danger; why would immortality (or Dickinson's inner sense of immortality) [9] serve as a chaperon if not to hinder the overzealous lover from making a final claim of what should be only a temporary liaison, ending in resurrection? [10]

The poem's second stop is not actual but logical:

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us— . . . . 

The death-thought is in no hurry. He forces his mistress to "pass" all life—the playful striving of childhood activity, the growing reflection ("Gazing Grain") of maturity, the sunset of seniority—to review it in passing, for this is what she will lose and what she will go beyond. Then comes a crucial correction. The carriage does not pass the sun, the sun passes by it. The correction does far more than to insist on the mimetic accuracy of the analogical setting. [11] That minor insistence on astronomical accuracy is only part of a greater reality principle. Had the carriage passed the sun, it would have passed out of time, to that place where all time could be viewed from a timeless height. The suitor Death would have been spurned for the chaperon Immortality. In fact, Dickinson writes some poems in which the persona, a compacted version of Goethe's Faust or Byron's Cain, gains such a high, holistic perspective—and without Satanic aid. [12] But this death vision is more solidly grounded. Life is not risen above, but lost. In a passage from an analogous poem, a persona bemoans a similar mistake which in this case goes uncorrected:

The single Flower of the Earth
That I, in passing by
Unconscious was—Great Nature's Face
Passed infinite by Me.

(978)

Dickinson wants us to recognize the value of life, the cost of death: vitality, nature. A greater existence eventually may be gained, but the stress here is on what must be given up and what must be "passed through" first, both in the life of the body and the stages of thought. Before the dawn, then, night:

The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

This is a night dew, giving off the cold that emanates from that "frigid zone," the grave. The crucial moment is near, and yet the tone of sociality persists. "The only Ghost I ever saw," Dickinson says in another poem, "Was dressed in Mechlin—" (274). The persona's sole worry seems to be that she will be dressed indecorously to assume the role of ghostly corpse. Even the grave is curiously domestic, simply a "house." Yet it is enough to make the "passing" carriage "pause," for this is a house with a difference. This house has the "civility" of the suitor Death, and its civility, like his, is cunning. [13] The cornice is the gravestone, the roof is the coffin lid; this house is not constructed on the ground by men, but seems "A Swelling of the Ground," an unnatural growth of natural dust. And, of course, it has no door, a fact which suggests the true reality of this house. From another poem:

Doom is the House without the Door—
'Tis entered from the Sun—
And then the Ladder's thrown away,
Because Escape—is done— . . .

(475)

Escape is not necessarily "done" in "Because I could not stop," but the veneer of civility is wiped away. The persona must admit the full force of the experience:

Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Head
Were toward Eternity—

(712)

John Lynen argues that the time since that day "feels shorter" because the realization of that final destination, "Eternity," creates an eternal moment in thought. [14] This is part of the explanation, but we should remember that "the Horses' Heads" point down as well as forward. The poem's greatest surprise, in fact, is the white space between stanzas five and six, in which the grave is not gone beyond and immortality does not replace death as a point of view. To combine Lynen's idea and mine, "Eternity" will be achieved only through its opposite, the grave with its indifference to (rather than expansion of) time. Time may "feel shorter" because the persona is no longer riding through time. She has been in pause ever since, either in terms of her thought or her physical reality, at or in the grave, pondering the gruesome timelessness of the grave and the sublime timelessness of a potential paradise. The "Day's surmise" is a question, next to which other questions shrink. The persona may be left, like the persona of "Our Journey had advanced," at the edge of "The Forest of the Dead," looking through it to the far "God at every Gate." Alternately, the persona may be pictured within the grave, in that "Forest of the Dead," in full confrontation with the thought of nothingness. Her attitude then can be expressed by another posthumous voice:

Were it a Witchcraft—were it Death—
I've still a chance to strain

To Being somewhere—Motion—Breath—
Though Centuries beyond,

And every limit a Decade—
I'll shiver, satisfied.

(1046, italics mine)

In either case, there is no final loss of faith in "Because I could not stop," but Dickinson's imagination receives a dual setback. The imagination is forced to stop for a terrifying thought, which then forces the imagination to admit that this thought constitutes its circumference of certitude.

We are ready now to answer more fully the question of why Dickinson makes us (and herself) confront these poems of dying and the grave. Dickinson's poetry shows her to be as enamored of Emersonian idealism as Emerson himself; but the realist in Dickinson fights off the bardic seer, and the poems we have just considered represent the realist's thrust. Like Emerson, Dickinson can say that "Paradise is of the option" (L 319), but she has a greater concern than Emerson for blocking forces, psychological and natural. She, too, sees thought as a process of constant expansion, but Emerson's circles become Dickinson's circumferences. That term, "circumference," is often overrated and made the key to an understanding of Dickinson. Thus it becomes mysterious. Simply put, "Circumference" may denote an ultimate, totally inclusive vision, but more often it is a name for the boundaries of thought and suggests exclusion as well. Dickinson strives to measure the imagination rather than to claim everything for it, and she wants it to earn its way, by suffering. Dickinson implies that a transcendental vision is hers for the asking, but

I should have been too saved—I see—
Too rescued—Fear too dim to me

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I should have had the Joy
Without the Fear—to justify—
The Palm—without the Calvary—
So Savior—Crucify— . . .

(313)

The death of the grave and its equivalents of emotional paralysis and cognitive limitation are not morbid concatenations. They constitute an attempt to ground ideal fictions in common experience, to force those fictions to keep in touch with the nerves. The grave is the antitype of circumference in its limiting sense. But the grave is not the final term in the typology. "The power and the glory are the post mortuary gifts" (L, p. 920), Dickinson writes in direct rebuttal of Emerson, but it is important to remember that often in Dickinson's typology "the post mortuary gifts" are available in experience as well as after.

This brings us to a more biographical defense of Dickinson's grave of skepticism. The American romantic typically begins his career with a comic vision and ends his career in tragedy. Emerson may speak of his writings as "a sort of Farmer's Almanac of mental moods" but the general weather gets wintry as he ages; Emerson's career, chronicled as "Freedom and Fate" by Stephen Whicher, [15] moves away from idealism toward necessity. The more skeptical Hawthorne suffers the same change artistically; once the master of playing with and merging diverse genres, his last four romances are botched, stranded, left unfinished. And Melville, once almost joyful in his relativity and skepticism, completes The Confidence Man and lapses into decades of nihilistic silence. This is melodrama and oversimplification, of course, but it suggests a pattern which is at once human and peculiarly romantic and American. Dickinson beats the system by her system. She "buries"—not hides but ostensibly inters—her fears, doubts, and frustrations within the typology of death. She mingles her pain with her power and joy, and conquers skepticism by making it a constant pressure on all her thoughts.

Notes

  1. For examples, see Miller, Poetry of Emily Dickinson, pp. 52–54; and Johnson, Interpretive Biography, pp. 106–13.

  2. Johnson very usefully presents all four versions of the poem (with the notes between Emily and Sue which contemplate the changes) in his three-volume edition of the Poems 1: 151–55.

  3. Ibid., p. 153.

  4. Elsewhere, Dickinson writes,

    Better a grave of Balm
    Toward human nature's home—
    And Robins near—
    Than a stupendous Tomb
    Proclaiming to the Gloom
    How dead we are—

    (1674)
  5. Poems which contrast natural vitality to the stillness of the tomb abound, and we considered some examples earlier. See also poems 529, 592, and 813.

  6. "Lie" is substituted for "sleep" and a few minor changes in punctuation are made which do not change the stanza's meaning.

  7. Poetry, p. 53.

  8. There are no major alterations in the third version.

  9. Elsewhere, Dickinson speaks of "Immortality" as "a shapeless friend" and cannot quite decide whether he is intrinsic or an external force or both, given as grace:

    Neither if He visit Other—
    Do He dwell—or Nay—know I
    But Instinct esteem Him

    Immortality—

    (679)
    As usual, Dickinson tries to negate the inner-outer dichotomy.

  10. The poem's sources are many. In an early letter, Dickinson mentions to her brother that she rode in a carriage "last evening with Sophomore Emmons, alone" (L 72). Poor Emmons! Discarded for "Death"! A literary source is suggested by Jack Capps in his excellent work, Emily Dickinson's Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 88–89. Capps points out limited similarities to Browning's "The Last Ride Together" and proves that Dickinson had read the poem. But "Death" as a "supple Suitor / That wins at last—" is largely Dickinson's own invention, inspired perhaps by metaphysical conceits, dependent no more on Browning than on Sophomore Emmons:

    It is a stealthy Wooing
    Conducted first
    By pallid innuendoes
    And dim approach
    But brave at last with Bugles
    And a bisected Coach
    It bears away in triumph
    To Troth unknown
    And Kindred as responsive
    As Porcelain.

    (1445)
    This later poem emphasizes the more implicit beguiling of the persona by Death in "Because I could not stop." Both Poems deny the hope of a heaven of restored human relations.

  11. The logic of this correction is fleshed out in another poem:

    Day—got tired of Me—
    How could I—of Him? . . .

    (425)
    Dickinson's personae cannot stop for death or tire of day. Her radical passivity is equaled only by her love of this life.

  12. See the following chapter for examples.

  13. We find this ironic description of the grave extended in an early poem:

    What Inn is this
    Where for the night
    Peculiar Traveller comes?
    Who is the Landlord?
    Where the maids?
    Behold, what curious rooms!
    No ruddy fires on the hearth—
    No brimming Tankards flow—
    Necromancer! Landlord!
    Who are these below?

    (115)
    Those who wish to ascribe a "romantic death wish" to Dickinson must ignore these poems of the grave. Death in itself, as stoppage rather than passage, is anathema to Dickinson. She is in favor of dynamic life, life on either side of the grave.

  14. "Three Uses of the Present," p. 134.

  15. Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1957; New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961).

 

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