Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –footnote1
Let’s process information in real time. A friend who is an excellent literary critic reminded me to stop for a second. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘You have to be ahead of Death—ahead in a race, ahead in a timed task—to stop for it or not stop for it. At the same time Death has to be ahead of you to stop for you or not stop for you.’
Emily Dickinson’s poem begins with a forcing move. Before asking what it means to stop for death, or for death to stop for you, before we grapple with the rest of the poem and the carriage ride it takes us on, we have a confusion of relative positions. Where were the speaker and Death relative to each other just now? Because the poem begins with ‘because’, which is a lawless subordinating conjunction (Why? Because), you don’t learn whose carriage held the speaker, Death, and Immortality, who invited who inside the carriage. A similar confusion happens midway through this six-stanza poem, as the speaker and Death travel together:
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 –
But this repetition of who passed whom hardly makes things clearer. While it is possible to be confused about the technical position of the earth relative to the sun, it’s not technically possible for something to be strictly behind and, by virtue of that, suddenly ahead.
Where is this impossible location? How does the wind blow there? Wherever it is, we witness a confrontation whose origins and outcomes are withheld, a common occurrence in Dickinson’s poems.footnote2 To speak in the language of stand offs and showdowns, ‘Because I could not stop for Death –’ is a poem about what happens when you’re proximate to something nearly impossible to gainsay or beat, like Death. It’s hard to tell what’s happening in the poem because the contest is taking place ‘earlier’ or somehow not in the landscape you had in mind for such a contest, if it is one at all. If we had to imagine a Point A to Point B for a human’s final stretch with Death, and all the significant points in between, these are probably not the points we would have imagined.