Readings · Poems
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · 20 lines
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
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 played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
About this reading
Emily Dickinson was persuaded to print only three or four poems while she lived, her editors wrote. These lines were first printed four years after her death, in the collection Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson made for Roberts Brothers of Boston in 1890. Death is imagined as a courteous caller who stops his carriage.
The first printing, of 1890, whose editors gave the poem the title The Chariot. Her own manuscripts kept almost no punctuation but dashes, and capitalized important words, as the Second Series preface of 1891 says; this text is her editors'. The Complete Poems of 1924 reads "At wrestling in a ring" where the third stanza here reads "Their lessons scarcely done".
- First published
- 1890
- Text from
- Poems by Emily Dickinson (Boston, 1890)
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