death." It is true that the poem is charged with eroticism whose end or aim is union,
perhaps as we conventionally know it, a synthesis of self and other for the explicit
purpose of the transformation of other or, if that proves impossible, for the loss of
self. Death’s heralding phenomenon, the loss of self, would be almost welcomed if self at
this point could be magically fused with other. . . .
. . . death is essence of the universe as well as its end, and the self is wooed and
won by this otherness that appears to define the totality of experience.
Indeed the trinity of death, self, immortality, however ironic a parody of the holy
paradigm, at least promises a conventional fulfillment of the idea that the body’s end
coincides with the soul’s everlasting life. But, as in "Our journey had
advanced," death so frequently conceptualized as identical with eternity here suffers
a radical displacement from it. While both poems suggest a discrepancy between eternity
and death, the former poem hedges on the question of where the speaker stands with respect
to that discrepancy, at its conclusion seeming to locate her safely in front of or
"before" death. "Because I could not stop for Death," on the other
hand, pushes revision one step further, daring to leave the speaker stranded in the moment
of death.
Along these revisionary lines, the ride to death that we might have supposed to take
place through territory unknown, we discover in stanza three to reveal commonplace sights
but now fused with spectacle. The path out of the world is also apparently the one through
it and in the compression of the three images ("the School, where Children
strove," "the Fields of Gazing Grain—," "the Setting
Sun—") we are introduced to a new kind of visual shorthand. Perhaps what is
extraordinary here is the elasticity of reference, how imposingly on the figural scale the
images can weigh while, at the same time, never abandoning any of their quite literal
specificity. Hence the sight of the children is a circumscribed one by virtue of the
specificity of their placement "At Recess—in the Ring—" and, at the
same time, the picture takes on the shadings of allegory. This referential flexibility or
fusion of literal and figural meanings is potential in the suggestive connotations of the
verb "strove," which is a metaphor in the context of the playground (that is, in
its literal context) and a mere descriptive verb in the context of the implied larger
world (that is, in its figural context). The "Fields of Gazing Grain—" also
suggest a literal picture, but one that leans in the direction of emblem; thus the epithet
"Gazing" has perhaps been anthropomorphized from the one-directional leaning of
grain in the wind, the object of its gazing the speaker herself. The "Children"
mark the presence of the world along one stage of the speaker’s journey, the "Gazing
Grain—" marks the passing of the world (its harkening after the speaker as she
rides away from it), and the "Setting Sun—" marks its past. For at least as
the third stanza conceives of it, the journey toward eternity is a series of successive
and, in the case of the grain, displaced visions giving way finally to blankness.
But just as after the first two stanzas, we are again rescued in the fourth from any
settled conception of this journey. As we were initially not to think of the journey
taking place out of the world (and hence with the children we are brought back to it), the
end of the third stanza having again moved us to the world’s edge, we are redeemed from
falling over it by the speaker’s correction: "Or rather—He passed
Us—." It is the defining movement of the poem to deliver us just over the
boundary line between life and death and then to recall us. Thus while the poem gives the
illusion of a one-directional movement, albeit a halting one, we discover upon closer
scrutiny that the movements are multiple and, as in "I heard a Fly buzz when I
died," constitutive of flux, back and forth over the boundary from life to death.
Despite the correction, "Or rather—He passed Us—," the next lines
register a response that would be entirely appropriate to the speaker’s passing of the
sun. "The Dews drew" round the speaker, her earthly clothes not only inadequate,
but actually falling away in deference to the sensation of "chill—" that
displaces them as she passes the boundary of the earth. Thus, on the one hand,
"chill—" is a mere physiological response to the setting of the sun at
night, on the other, it is a metaphor for the earlier assertion that the earth and earthly
goods are being exchanged for something else. Implications in the poem, like the more
explicit assertions, are contradictory and reflexive, circling back to underline the very
premises they seem a moment ago to have denied. Given such ambiguity, we are constantly in
a quandary about how to place the journey that, at anyone point, undermines the very
certainty of conception it has previously established.
[Cameron here inserts an analysis of George Herbert's "Redemption"]
While Dickinson’s representation of the ride with death is less histrionic, it is as
insistent in our coming to terms with the personalization of the even and of its perpetual
reenactment in the present. For the grave that is "paused before" in the fifth
stanza, with the tombstone lying flat against the ground ("scarcely
visible—"), is seen from the outside and then (by the transformation of spatial
considerations into temporal ones) is passed by or through: "Since then—’tis
Centuries—." The poem’s concluding stanza both fulfills the traditional
Christian notion that while the endurance of death is essential for the reaching of
eternity, the two are not identical, and by splitting death and eternity with the space of
"Centuries—," chal1enges that traditional notion. The poem that has thus
far played havoc with our efforts to fix its journey in any conventional time or space, on
this side of death or the other, concludes with an announcement about the origins of its
speech, now explicitly equivocal: "’tis Cen- turies—and yet / Feels shorter than
the Day." What in "There’s a certain Slant of light" had been a clear
relationship between figure and its fulfillment (a sense of perceptive enlightenment
accruing from the movement of one to the other) is in this poem manifestly baffling. For
one might observe that for all the apparent movement here, there are no real progressions
in the poem at all. If the correction "We passed the Setting Sun— / Or
rather—He passed Us—" may be construed as a confirmation of the slowness of
the drive alluded to earlier in the poem, the last stanza seems to insist that the
carriage is standing still, moving if at all, as we say, in place. For the predominant
sense of this journey is not simply its endlessness; it is also the curious back and forth
sweep of its images conveying, as they do, the perpetual return to what has been
perpetually taken leave of.
Angus Fletcher, speaking in terms applicable to "Because I could not stop for
Death," documents the characteristics of allegorical journeys as surrealistic in
imagery (as for example, the "Gazing Grain—"), paratactic in rhythm or
structure (as indeed we can hear in the acknowledged form of movement: "We passed . .
. We passed . . . We passed . . . Or rather—He passed Us . . . We Paused . . .
"), and almost always incomplete: "It is logically quite natural for the
extension to be infinite, since by definition there is no such thing as the whole of any
analogy; all analogies are incomplete, and incompletable, and allegory simply records this
analogical relation in a dramatic or narrative form."
But while the poem has some of the characteristics of allegory, it nonetheless seems to
defy such easy classification. Thus the utterance is not quite allegory because it is not
strongly iconographic (its figures do not have a one-to-one correspondence with a
representational base), and at the same time, these figures are sufficiently rigid to
preclude the freeing up of associations that is characteristic of the symbol. We recall
Coleridge’s distinction between a symbolic and an allegorical structure. A symbol
presupposes a unity with its object. It denies the separateness between subject and object
by creating a synecdochic relationship between itself and the totality of what it
represents; like the relationship between figure and thing figured discussed in the first
part of this chapter, it is always part of that totality. Allegory, on the other hand, is
a sign that refers to a specific meaning from which it continually remains detached.
Through its abstract embodiment, the allegorical form makes the distance between itself
and its original meaning clearly manifest. It accentuates the absolute cleavage between
subject and object. Since the speaker in "Because I could not stop for Death"
balances between the boast of knowledge and the confession of ignorance, between a oneness
with death and an inescapable difference from it, we may regard the poem as a partial
allegory. The inability to know eternity, the failure to be at one with it, is, we might
say, what the allegory of "Because I could not stop for Death" makes manifest.
The ride with death, though it espouses to reveal a future that is past, in fact casts
both past and future in the indeterminate present of the last stanza. Unable to arrive at
a fixed conception, it must rest on the bravado (and it implicitly knows this) of its
initial claim. Thus death is not really civilized; the boundary between otherness and
self, life and death, is crossed, but only in presumption, and we might regard this fact
as the real confession of disappointment in the poem’s last stanza.
from Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Copyright ? 1979 by The
Johns Hopkins UP.
Jane Donahue Eberwein
Dickinson’s most famous poem spoken from beyond the grave confronts precisely this
problem: the assertiveness of the circuit world ["the world of matter and time and
intellectual awareness . . . busyness is the circuit world’s dominant characteristic,
industry its major value"] against the claims of complementary vision . . . The
representative of the verse here is a decidedly imaginary person—not Emily
Dickinson’s self-projection (which would be of one straining for escape beyond
circumference and intensely alert to all details of transition) but a woman contented
within the routine of circuit busyness. Her opening words echo some of Dickinson’s own
habitual usages but present a contradictory value system adapted to worldly achievements.
This lady has been industrious—too busy to stop her work, whatever it may have been.
Dickinson, too, proclaimed herself too busy in her self-descriptive July 1862 letter to
Higginson and in a letter to Mrs. Holland that Johnson and Ward place conjecturally at the
same time on the basis of obvious verbal echoes (L 268; 269). To Higginson she wrote:
"Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that—My Business is
Ci