Why I’m wondering whether you’re immortal once you die:

 Because I could not stop for Death – (479) by… | Poetry Foundation 

Emily Dickinson is interesting and she's written at least two very skillfully crafted poems. One of them, I read in elementary school, and the other I read this week. Because I Could Not For Death was particularly accessible to me because it wasn’t too abstract, but I could interpret it in my own way. 

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst Massachusetts, on December 10th, 1830, and lived most of her life there. She had two siblings, an older brother, and a younger sister. She never married, and she spent lots of her time in isolation and mainly only wrote to her friends, perhaps because of anxiety or simply to focus on her poems. Her brother Austin married Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, and while their relationship became estranged, Susan and Emily were extremely close, and their relationship is suggested to have been romantic. They wrote letters to each other five years before Susan got married. 

She wrote about death and immortality often. Several of her close friends and family members, as well as other pets, love interests, and mentors she was close to, died and their deaths took a very hard toll on her, not to mention she lived through the civil war, and she lived in the house that her grandpa and another family died in. After her cousin died, she was sent to Boston in an attempt to help her recover. Once her nephew died, her sister said she became “delicate”, and her illness began shortly after that, until she died on 15 May 1886, at 55 years old by Bright’s disease according to her doctor, but some historians believe she had a heart attack and very high blood pressure. 

Her preoccupation with death is very evident in her poem Because I could not stop for Death, which she wrote in 1863 when she was thirty-three years old, three years after she isolated herself more and more from society, and when she went to Cambridge to be treated for a severe eye condition that lasted for many months. The poem starts with Death, or the Grim Reaper, stopping by Emily in a carriage, he seems kind in Emily’s regard, which could indicate that she was very tired of life when she wrote the poem, or she could simply see death as a gateway to Heaven, and nothing to be feared. Already in the carriage, is Immortality, and the carriage moved very slowly, which I think describes her perception that life is just waiting for death. Additionally, the second stanza enforces how much she devotes her thoughts to death, putting aside all labor and leisure out of respect or fascination with him. 

In the carriage, she observes children playing, and “gazing grain” which is very passively living, suggesting that we are all powerless to death or the “setting sun”, and we are often passive in our lives. She says, “it passed us”, describing the powerlessness or briefness of our lives, as if saying the world exists without us, showing us that Emily Dickinson lived, looking at the world as if she was dead. 

Then she talks about “the Dews”, drawing chill and quiveringly, she shifts the tone of the poem from detached and resolved, to powerless in a fearful way. The dews are “drawn down” by the coldness of the night (symbolic of death), the dew symbolizes the fear that death creates. Then she goes back to herself, who I’m not sure if is dead or alive, and says she is wearing a gown of gossamer, which is like cobwebs, describing her own body rotting or being forgotten. She gives herself a ghostly vibe by describing her tippet, which is like a scarf or shawl as being made of tulle, a silky, thin material used to make veils and dresses. It seems like her life in others’ memory is retreating and concealing itself in death. 

The last two stanzas are the most interesting to me because they go back to her void and almost peaceful state while describing the ever-looming death if she is even still alive in that carriage. When she describes the house, which seems to be an opening in the ground itself, she says the carriage pauses. She doesn’t give any more detail on the house, or what happened there. In fact, she never even explicitly says the carriage started moving again, but I got the sense that after the pause, instead of going through whatever supposed afterlife the house seemed to hold, there was no destination, and she stayed moving in the carriage since the horses were going towards eternity. 

This poem is especially interesting because it depicts death or the afterlife just as void as her emotions toward it when she first gets in the carriage. I’m also intrigued by when she officially died, looking back, it seems like she died as soon as she got in the carriage, but while I was reading it seemed as though Emily was still living, and Death in the carriage symbolized the presence of Death in the quite living thoughts, not the literal imagination of her union with it. Her poem is rather paradoxical since she presents both life and death as one continuum. The gazing grain and the setting sun could reflect either death, because of their continuities or passiveness, or life, because they are both parts of life. 

Going back to the beginning, this poem exemplifies her unique poetry, with its lack of a rhyme scheme, capitalization, and abundant dashes for punctuation. Additionally, her meter is split in each stanza, with the first two lines in iambic tetrameter, and the second two in iambic trimeter.