Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped…

The poem opens on a paradox: too busy to stop for Death, the speaker is collected by him, like a lady by a courteous gentleman caller. They drive slowly in a carriage that holds just the two of them “And Immortality”; she has put away her labour and her leisure “For his civility”. They pass a school where children play, fields of “gazing grain”, the setting sun: the stages of a life. Then they pause before “a house that seemed / A swelling of the ground”, a grave. In the last stanza the speaker reveals that “centuries” have passed since that day, yet they feel shorter than the day she first guessed where the horses were heading.

Emily Dickinson wrote the poem in the early 1860s. It was published in 1890, four years after her death, in the first collection of her poems. Its editors left out a stanza that her manuscript places after the setting sun: the dews grow chill, and she notices that her gown is only gossamer.

Because I could not stop for Death, first lines (written c. 1863), 1890

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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