Dickinson's BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

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Dickinson's BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH 

It has been the general difficulty with critical exegeses of Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death—" that (1) "Death" and "Immortality" in the first stanza seem unaccountably syncopated, and (2) the "I first surmised the Horses' Heads/Were toward Eternity—" of the end of the poem remains equally enigmatically without derivation. I offer the following interpretive possibility.

The crux of the poem's meanings, I suggest, is in the first two lines, "Because I could not stop for Death—/He kindly stopped for me—". We have tended mechanically to read this to mean that since the narrative subject of the poem finds herself rather too involved in the humdrum of living, with no thought of death, Death like a civil gentleman-suitor stops by in his chaise and four to take the busy

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persona out for the final ride, paradoxically, to the accompaniment of "Immortality." I think the lines lead us into a simplistic literalness because of the deceptive surface. Read them as you would a prototypical "romantic" utterance and the problem begins to solve itself.

To wit, translate the persona's not stopping for death into an imaginative perception of the nonreality of death. Death is death only to those who live within the time-bound finite world outside of the imaginative infinity of consciousness. That being so, the "stopped" of the second line takes on a profoundly rich ambiguity. Whereas clearly the metaphor of Death stopping by is to be retained as one level of courtship, more essentially, since the persona's consciousness has negated death, Death in turn stops, that is, ceases to be (the full richness of the initial "because" should now be apparent). And, appropriately, from that dialectic of consciousness is generated "Immortality."

The rest of the poem carries forward the poetic journey through a necessary but obviously imagined framework of body-consciousness in which the "chill" of the "Setting Sun" is sensually rendered. Yet, when the carriage comes to the grave—"A Swelling of the Ground—" entrance is not made: "we paused before a House" merely (emphasis added). So that the "Immorality achieve at the very beginning remains unthreatened even as death is sensibly confronted. And when the retrospective voice comes back after centuries, the poem only returns to its first accomplished vision of the nonreality of death in an unbroken moment of consciousness:

Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity.

The "first" surmise recalls how "Immortality" was attained at the start of the poem, and in a remarkable conflation of the romantic and the Christian, the dreaded Horses of the Apocalypse are comfortably perceived as yielding only everlasting life in a grand personal apotheosis: "He kindly stopped for me" (emphasis added).

—B. N. RAINA, University of Wisconsin—Madisori

2.THE CHARIOT

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.

There are, of course, many possible ways to interpret this poem. Richard Sewall, for example, suggested that the poem “commemorates the birth of the poet in her, the time of poetic awakening, ” as well as “her recognition of her all-encompassing theme … the meaning of eternity in the light of which all things, from childhood to the grave, must now be seen” (LED, p. 572).

What is most striking in Tate's reading of the poem, in an intense page of analysis, is how strangely “Southern” it is in image and theme. The poem becomes, in Tate's hands, an evocation of genteel life as it might have been lived on a Southern plantation before the Civil War:

The content of death in the poem eludes explicit definition. He is a gentleman taking a lady out for a drive. But note the restraint that keeps the poet fromcarrying this so far that it becomes ludicrous and incredible; and note the subtly interfused erotic motive, which the idea of death has presented to most romantic poets, love being a symbol interchangeable with death. The terror of death is objectified through this figure of the genteel driver, who is made ironically to serve the end of Immortality. (Man of Letters, pp. 219–20)

The poem, for Tate, records one of those stately rituals of a conservative society: “a gentleman taking a lady out for a drive. ” Tate's “genteel driver” embodies the Southern ideal of chivalry. It is essential to his view of the poem that it has a rural, and specifically agricultural, setting: “The sharp gazing before grain instills into nature a cold vitality of which the qualitative richness has infinite depth” (Man of Letters, p. 219). The images at the heart of “Because I could not stop for death” arise from one of those “organic” and “deep” agrarian societies that Tate most admired.

Of course, Dickinson meets Tate halfway. Her poem does portray a stately social encounter between a lady of “leisure” and a man of “civility. ” The adverbs in the first two stanzas – “He kindly stopped for me”; “We slowly drove, he knew no haste” – confirm the genteel world of ritual and gallantry evoked in Tate's reading. Even the title that Higginson and Todd provided, “The Chariot, ” suggests an antique world – perhaps the lost world of the Negro spiritual “Swing low, sweet chariot. ” (There may even be a specific allusion here. Before the Civil War, Higginson had made a tour of the South, and was one of the first to collect spirituals – what he called “slave songs. ” Higginson may have preceded Tate in sensing an affinity between the stately arrival of death's chariot in Dickinson's poem and the angelic chariot in “Swing low. ”)

What Tate ignores, or glosses over in his line about “the genteel driver  made ironically to serve the end of Immortality, ” is that there are three characters in the poem, not two. As the poet-critic Randall Jarrell, another Southerner, who had studied with Tate and Ransom in his youth, pointed out, the poem was like someone saying, “We have a nice hotel room. The girl, myself, and the Sphinx. ” Tate's erasure of the third figure is significant, and indicates just how committed he is to a certain scene – genteel, agrarian, ritualized – evoked in his mind by the poem. This mysterious third figure, whom Dickinson names “Eternity, ” complicates the picture of a gentleman and lady taking a drive. A chaperon, perhaps?

There is, to be sure, a certain unintended irony in Tate's view of Emily Dickinson as the voice of a pre-industrial society, a poet who “had nothing to do with … the rising plutocracy of the East. ” For if Dickinson's father and brother did not excel in the “rising plutocracy, ” it was not for lack of effort; in any case, the two treasurers of Amherst College did well enough in the world. Edward Dickinson invested in all sorts of financial schemes.

“I must make some money in some way, ” he wrote his wife in 1835, “and if I don't speculate in the lands, at the 'East,' I must at the 'West.'” One wouldn't know from Dickinson's deliberately naïve poem “I like to see it lap the miles” that her Whig father lobbied and labored hard to bring the railroad – that symbol of the Gilded Age, dear to all Whig politicians – to water-power-poor Amherst, in order to improve prospects of commerce and trade. (A locomotive was named in his honor.) Emily Dickinson attended the opening ceremonies for the Amherst railroad station, a stone's throw from the Homestead on Main Street. But Tate will take the carriage poem, thank you, and not the railroad poem.

Tate's Southern reading of “Because I could not stop for death” raises an interesting question. Could Emily Dickinson's poetry owe something to her own direct experience of Southern ways of life? Emily Dickinson made one trip to the South, in February and March 1855, during her father's tenure in Congress. It was certainly the furthest she ever traveled, and, except for her sojourn in Boston because of eye trouble nine years later, it was her longest period away from Amherst. The trip has inspired a great deal of speculation, centered upon the two weeks Dickinson spent in Philadelphia on the return trip, when she is rumored to have had her crucial encounter with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church. (For many years, Wadsworth has headed the list of Dickinson's possible lovers.)

The Southern segment of the trip – three weeks in Washington DC with at least one foray into Virginia – has received far less attention. But two letters from the trip, one to the Gilbert sisters and one to Mrs. Holland, make clear that Dickinson was drawn to the genteel manners, the polished elegance, and the soft weather of the South. In a letter to Susan and Martha Gilbert, sent from Washington on 28 February, Dickinson reveled in the Southern spring:

Sweet and soft as summer, Darlings, maple trees in bloom and grass green in the sunny places – hardly seems it possible this is winter still; and it makes the grass spring in this heart of mine and each linnet sing, to think that you have come [back to Amherst]. (L 178)

In a letter to Mrs. Holland dated 18 March, she recounted a visit she had made with her sister, Lavinia, to Mount Vernon:

I will not tell you what I saw – the elegance, the grandeur; you will not care to know the value of the diamonds my Lord and Lady wore, but if you haven't been to the sweet Mount Vernon, then I will tell you how on one soft spring day we glided down the Potomac in a painted boat, and jumped upon the shore – how hand in hand we stole along up a tangled pathway till we reached the tomb of General George Washington, how we paused beside it, and no one

spoke a word, then hand in hand, walked on again, not less wise or sad for that marble story; how we went within the door – raised the latch he lifted when he last went home – thank the Ones in Light that he's since passed in through a brighter wicket! Oh, I could spend a long day, if it did not weary you, telling of Mount Vernon – and I will sometime if we live and meet again, and God grant we shall! (L 179)

These letters reveal a pleasure in the “soft” spring of the South, and in the “elegance” and “grandeur” of the great plantation of Mount Vernon. “We have had many pleasant times, ” Dickinson told Mrs. Holland, “and seen much that is fair, and heard much that is wonderful – many sweet ladies and noble gentlemen have taken us by the hand and smiled upon us pleasantly – and the sun shines brighter for our way thus far. ” The sisters befriended a Mrs. James Brown of Alabama who later sent them a novel by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps as a gift. It is easy to imagine those sweet Southern ladies and noble gentlemen making their way into poems like “Because I could not stop for death. ”

I want to close this discussion of the “conservative” Dickinson with a final chapter in the twentieth-century reception of Emily Dickinson, namely, the extraordinary body of feminist criticism during the last third of the century. I think it is fair to say that this has been the dominant wing of Dickinson criticism for the past twenty-five years or so. I believe, though, that the true roots of this criticism, at least as it regards Emily Dickinson, go back to the Agrarian idea of Dickinson as cultural custodian and reactionary rebel. A further impetus, also stemming in part from the Agrarians, was the so-called “confessional” poetry of the late 1950s and 1960s, which made Dickinson's voice “audible” in new and compelling ways.

When Emily Dickinson's complete poems were published more or less in the form in which she wrote them, in 1955, the Southern interpretation once again prevailed. John Crowe Ransom, a leading figure in the old Agrarian circles and a key “New Critic, ” argued, in an essay called “Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored, ” that “the principal literary event of these last twenty years or so [i.e., from 1935 to 1955] has … been the restoration just now of an old poet” who “in most ways … was surely not one of our 'moderns.'” Ransom's analysis of Dickinson's biographical situation turned out to have an unexpectedly powerful influence among feminist critics of her poetry.

Ransom's essay recapitulates Tate's cultural analysis of Dickinson's Amherst – “where in her time the life and the metaphysics were still in the old Puritan tradition, being almost boastfully remote from what went on across the state in Boston. ” He quotes “Because I could not stop for death, ” with its restored fourth stanza, but his interpretation is essentially Tate's genteel one: “Death's victim now is the shy spinster, so he presents

himself as a decent civil functionary making a call upon a lady to take her for a drive” (Ransom, “Poet Restored, ” p. 90).

Ransom's essay is of particular interest, however, for the way in which it recasts certain questions about Dickinson's relation to the vocation of poetry. What Ransom notices is the singular split between Dickinson's daily life as “a little home-keeping person” (p. 89), extraordinarily ill at ease with other people, and the explosive and confident persona we encounter in so many of her poems. It is a disjunction he finds to be typical of poets. She has adopted what William Butler Yeats called the “poet's mask: the personality which was antithetical to her natural character and identical with her desire” (p. 97). Ransom draws a parallel between Dickinson and Whitman in this regard:

By nature gentle but indecisive, plain in looks, almost anonymous in her want of any memorable history, she chose as an artist to claim a heroic history which exhibited first a great passion, then renunciation and honor, and a passage into the high experiences of a purified Soul. That is the way it would seem to figure out. And we have an interesting literary parallel if we think in these terms about the poetry of her contemporary, Walt Whitman. A good deal of notice has been paid lately to Whitman by way of pointing out that he was an impostor, because the aggressive masculinity which he asserted so blatantly in the poems was only assumed. But that would be Walt Whitman's mask. (pp. 97–8)

Ransom's view of the shy spinster adopting the bold mask would seem, on the face of it, to have little to do with the feminist interpretation of Dickinson that began to emerge a couple of decades later. And yet, the line from his essay to the influential treatment of Dickinson in the classic feminist work The Madwoman in the Attic is direct, as the authors, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, implicitly acknowledge. Ransom is the single most invoked figure in their discussion of Dickinson. How did this come about? We will have to make a bit of a detour to explain it.

During the 1950s, it was as a poet of religious structures that Dickinson appeared in some of the most influential literary criticism. Tate's emphasis on Dickinson's religious vocabulary and traditional culture found persuasive expression in Richard Wilbur's elegant poem “Altitudes” (1956), with its comparison (or rather equation) of two perspectives, the dome of St. Peter's in Rome and Emily Dickinson's cupola in Amherst. In an important essay published the same year, which recapitulates much of Tate's argument, Wilbur chose Dickinson's oxymoronic phrase “Sumptuous Destitution” to name what he took to be the central strategy in her work – a sort of less-is-more attitude. This “paradox that privation is more plentiful than plenty” could – in Wilbur's view – make a Rome of Amherst. Of course, this was another turn in the old argument about Dickinson's deliberate “withdrawal. ” Wilbur,

Tate, and the rest believed that Dickinson had gained something important – some spiritual boon – by turning her back on “plenty. ”

But something else was happening as well during the late 1950s. American poetry, long in thrall to modernist notions of “impersonality, ” took an autobiographical or “confessional” turn. Poets such as Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman (soon followed by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) began to quarry their own lives for material, and the first-person singular returned to poetry with a vengeance. It was at just this moment that Emily Dickinson was “restored, ” and this group of poets was particularly attuned to her own version of “confessional” poetry. The autobiographical turn that dominated American poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s made Dickinson's poetry, with its forceful, “I”-dominated voice, particularly audible. Several members of the group of American poets who came of age during the 1950s – the “middle generation” that included Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell – were intensely interested in Dickinson. The Southerner Jarrell was taking notes for an extended essay on Dickinson at the time of his apparent suicide in 1965. His tentative title for the essay was “The Empress of Calvary, ” clearly another version of the idea of “Sumptuous Destitution. ” In some of his own most effective later poems, Jarrell had been experimenting with women's voices, not so much in the older mode of the dramatic monologue – the creation of “believable” women characters – as in an uncanny attempt to probe his own androgynous self. As he read through Dickinson's complete poems, Jarrell was thrilled to find what he perceived to be confirmation (and provocation) for his experiments in Dickinson's practice. He reminded himself to “Notice change in versions” of poem Fr 346 (from “I showed her Heights she never saw” to “He showed me Hights I never saw –”), and in the contrasting versions of “Going to Him! Happy letter!” and “Going – to – Her! Happy – Letter. ” Current readers may be more inclined to see, especially in the second instance, experimentation with sexual orientation rather than gender. Nonetheless, the importance for “confessional” writing is obvious.

Berryman too was proud of his skill in what he called “the administration of pronouns. ” Without playing with “ambiguous pronouns, ” he claimed, he could never have written his first major poem,Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Berryman didn't much like the poetry of his “muse, ” the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet; she concerned him, he admitted, “almost from the beginning, as a woman, not much as a poetess. ” His “impersonation” of her was an attempt to inhabit her body, and to experience imaginatively such female experiences as childbirth.

But late in his life, Berryman (like Jarrell) became obsessed with Dickinson. Having modeled the sprawling form of his Dream Songs on Whitman's

Song of Myself, he tried in his last few books to learn all he could from Dickinson's leaner poetry. Judging from his late tribute to her, “Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140, ” it was a certain wildness in the language and behavior of “Squire Dickinson's cracked daughter” that appealed to him most, as his own life unraveled in alcoholism and eventual suicide. Some biographical details are garbled in his poem – Dickinson deflected Judge Otis Lord's romantic attentions, not the reverse – but it remains a handsome rebuttal to Higginson's early qualms about Dickinson's poetry.

Higginson's response to Dickinson's “cracked” poetry (more alcohol than pearl, in his view) is also the starting point for Adrienne Rich's very different (and far more effective) poem of 1964. “'I Am in Danger – Sir'” is, among other things, a meditation on the peculiar fate of Dickinson's posthumous reception, which Rich sees as a sort of embattled museum of relics, scraps, and objects that fail to cohere. Rich shares Berryman's sympathy for Dickinson's subversive “wildness” (in marked contrast to Wilbur's decorous version of her). And Rich, like Jarrell, is interested in Dickinson's subverting of gender: “you, woman, masculine/ in single-mindedness. ” Rich's poem makes a fine pendant for her classic essay on Dickinson, “Vesuvius at Home” (1975), which develops some of the same ideas of the explosive imagination lurking behind the “feminine” decorum of Dickinson's daily life. Rich's excavation of Dickinson's life and work, and her focus on such theretofore neglected poems as “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun, ” set the agenda for feminist criticism of Dickinson's life and work.

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In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are at pains to define what they call “the 'problem' of lyric poetry by women” (p. 582). While women writers have excelled in prose fiction, and especially in Gothic narrative, in both verse and prose, lyric poetry has remained largely the province of male writers. The problem, as they see it, turns on the kind of self-assertion demanded of poets but denied women. They invoke the Dickinson critic Suzanne Juhasz's concept of the “double-bind” of the woman poet: “on the one hand, the impossibility of self-assertion for a woman, on ...

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