[RCL]

Sound and Sense in Emily Dickinson’s Grave Poem

(Johnson’s 712; Franklin 479)

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 strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

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

Of Emily Dickinson’s many personas, the most remarkable are spirits speaking about the moment of death and its aftermath. Perhaps most widely anthologized, read, and analyzed are “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—“ (465) and “Because I could not stop for Death—“ (712), both brilliant, their meanings elusive. But she is unusually dazzling in the latter: its sound effects, imagery, and meter convey a view that skeptically undercuts Christian notions of an after-life.

In stanza 1, lines 2 and 4 rhyme perfectly (me/Immortality), setting the basic rhyme scheme. There’s slightly more slanting in stanza 2 (away/Civility)—and a surprise in stanza 3: Ring/Sun. Some might read the rhyme as the “n” of each word, but it can also be considered a “conceptual rhyme,” here based on the circle, which echoes the cyclic nature of life and death traced by the imagery: childhood to adulthood, day to night, up to down, dust to dust, and womb to timeless tomb. Multiple internal rhymes occur throughout the poem, but especially in stanza 3: alliteration, assonance, and consonance—listen to the echoing of double esses in lines 1-4!

As in stanza 3, Dickinson’s “After great pain a formal feeling comes—“ (341) conceptually rhymes this pair: round/Ought. Also called “thought rhyme” or “parallelism,” it was common to the Hebrew poetry translated for the Bay Psalm Book, with which she was very familiar. At least one critic, Helen McNeil, considers Dickinson’s “quatrains parodic of the Bay Psalm Book.” Other examples of conceptual rhyme include poems as early as “I have a Bird in spring” (5), which establishes a consistent antithetical pattern that conceptually rhymes the 3rd and 6th lines of each stanza: decoys/gone; flown/return; mine/thine; see/Removed; flown/return. Each pair also rhymes sound and sight elements.

Returning to 712, the rhyme is even more slanted in stanza 4, combining both sight and sound elements (chill/Tulle). With stanza 5, forecasting the inevitable ending in the grave she thinks is “a House,” rhyme give way to the identity of Ground/ Ground. The soul speaks from the vantage point of immortality and eternity; but, ironically, it remains in the ground for “Centuries.” There was a “pause” before the earthen “House” but no apparent continuation. Implicitly, there is no traditional heaven or hell.

For closure, stanza 6 returns to a rhyme similar to that of stanza 1 (Day/Eternity). The naïve voice of stanza 1 has modulated to that of cold and confused acceptance in 6—where the soul admits her “surmise”: a guess or assumption that she was being taken to heaven. At best, perhaps, she’s in a state of suspension this side of heaven’s gate.

Not only does degradation in the rhyme scheme echo the speaker’s soul “passing” away from the body’s time consciousness (stanzas 1-3; in 3, “We passed” thrice), but also there’s a turn, or “volta,” at the poem’s mid-point, line 1 of stanza 4. * After saying, “We passed the Setting Sun” in 3, the speaker has a diminished sense of temporality. She corrects herself as the sun, time’s measure, disappears, saying, “Or rather—He passed Us—.” Her confusion carries over to the next line, assigning “quivering and chill” to the “Dews” rather than to herself. The imagery has traced her transition from the upper world of light and clear memories to the underworld of darkness, chill, and timeless death.

A further clue to Dickinson’s intention may be the metrically ambiguous first line of stanza 4. Since every other stanza’s first line is iambic, it might be read, Or RAther HE passed US, making it trimeter rather than tetrameter as in the other stanzas (all 4343)—as she loses a bit of time? As time itself succumbs to gravity? Or it could be read as 2 iambic feet (Or RAther HE) followed by a spondee (PASSED US), giving it 4 beats and which would emphasize the error of her surmise.

Also unlike other stanzas, the second line has 4 beats: The DEWS grew QUIVerING and CHILL. If the preceding is 3 beats and this 4, Dickinson has reversed the pattern to 3443 just as the speaker’s soul sharply turns from its clear comprehension of the temporal world to timelessness. Either way, these lines call further attention to the ironically grave ending.


*Camille Paglia hears a tonal shift at this mid-point in Break, Blow, Burn, which helped call my attention to the meter of that stanza. I can’t quite see, as she does, that Mr. Death is the cad, trickster, and confidence man who seduces the speaker and betrays her to a gothic house of horror—knowing the poet’s skeptical bent, I suspect self-delusion on the persona’s part. Nor am I completely convinced by the provocative suggestion of a betraying Christ. But Ms Paglia provides an excellent close reading without discussing meter and only mentioning the childlike rhyme of stanza 1.



[This message has been edited by RCL (edited May 23, 2007).]

[Lee Harlin Bahan]

Hi, Ralph. I've got an Emily-based sonnet exercise over at D&A, so you thread piqued my interest, especially your noting a turn in 712. Haven't got time for a long post, but here are some things that popped into my head as I was reading what you wrote.

If you are writing an essay to submit for publication, you will strengthen your argument by suggesting that the "conceptual rhyme" derives from the parallel structure of Hebrew poetry via the Bay Psalm Book, granddaddy of hymn meter in New England. I privately have called this device "thought rhyme" for the last thirty years. Yours is an interesting, original idea--that Emily uses "thought rhyme"--and I would love for you to make your case airtight, giving us all a new tool for understanding how Emily's poetry works.

You also may want to check into some scriptural/doctrinal matters. While on the cross, Christ told the repentant thief that he would be with Christ in Paradise that very same day, presumably right after death. Later on in the NT we are told that there will be a bodily resurrection. I always solved this seeming contradiction by assuming that the Soul of a saved person went and hung out in some kind of Heavenly waiting room and then on Judgment Day the body was beamed up and reconstituted/perfected by a divine version of Star Trek's transporter. Obviously, I'm not worried about the mechanics of it, but Emily seems to be at least in the territory of these issues, and she would have been very familiar with the scripture involved. My immediate impression is that Emily's rhyme/meter starts out perfect and whole, then decays until the sound changes characteristic of rhyme stop at the identity, appropriately "ground": the poem's rhyme sceme as a whole is a metaphor for bodily decay, becoming one with the earth, also biblical, dust to dust. The slant rhyme in the last stanza "matches" the contradiction/dissonance between how much time has passed and how the liberated Soul/consciousness "feels." The upshot of the whole poem is that the speaker is emotionally ambivalent about being freed from bodily life. To use my metaphor, the first three stanzas, the Soul is headed for the Heavenly Waiting Room and not concerned about abandoning the Body. After the turn, the Soul experiences some kind of empathy with/nostalgia for the abandoned, decaying Body, and maybe longs for "the day when the dead in Christ shall rise," to be re-united with the senses, physical feeling. A very nice meditation, gentle questioning, of the Body/Soul dichotomy.

Sorry to go on so, but I enjoyed the opportunity to think about Emily for a while. Thanks!

Best wishes,
Lee

[wendy v]

Oh, I love the idea of conceptual, or thought rhyme.
Good information and food for thinking, both. I enjoy these Close Reads.

[RCL]

Lee and Wendy, thanks for looking in. I've done some editing to accomodate several your suggetions, Lee. Thanks for reminding me of the Bay Psalm Book! I intend to examine the rest of her poems for backup evidence.

Cheers,
Ralph

[Mark Allinson]

I enjoyed that, Ralph, thanks.

And I agree, that one of the best tools for explicating a poem is more poems from the same poet.

I couldn't resist having a shot at this one myself - I hope you don't mind. Here's how I see it.

Mors Janua Vitae

I love this poem, and that’s how I would title this rather tendentious mini-essay below – because this is what the poem says to me: “death is the gateway to life.”

First, we should always remember that there is no possibility of a comprehensive, objective reading of any poem. Ralph’s close-reading above is just as much “right” as this one, though very different. The words of the poem, their meanings and associated images, will always vary significantly from reader to reader. For instance, someone who was savaged by a dog as a child will not read the word “dog” in a poem in the same way as a person who had only positive childhood experiences of dogs.

In a real sense - and especially with a poem as densely imaged and gnomic as these - poems read us, like Rorschach ink-blots: what we see in the poem is what the poem draws from our unconscious. As Oscar Wilde so wittily points out, criticism is merely one of the more revealing modes of autobiography. Which is one of the great features of poetry, that it can help reveal us more fully to ourselves.

My first response to this poem is to recognize its mysticism. Yes, I count Emily as a mystical poet. And nowhere do we see so much evidence of a mystical sensibility in her poems than in those on the subject of death.

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

The ego-self is not usually prepared to surrender itself – it will not stop for death. Death must impinge upon the self until it is forced to recognize its inescapable reality.

The degree of irony heard in the word “kindly” here will be a function of the reader’s own attitude towards death. I do not hear irony in “kindly”, but an honest statement of gratitude. Life is only truly lived in the conscious awareness of the presence of death, so its arrival is a gift of deeper life. This is not the awareness of death as something to be feared and put-off till the final moments of bodily life – but death as a constant psychological presence NOW. As Emily says elsewhere:

1065

Let down the Bars, Oh Death --
The tired Flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat
Whose wandering is done

Thine is the stillest night
Thine the securest Fold
Too near Thou art for seeking Thee
Too tender, to be told.


Death is not “out there” and “one day” but (like God Himself) “too near for seeking”.

And this is what the poem is for me – a meditation on life lived within the vital, mystical presence of death.

The perception of the presence of death is not a depressing or annihilating future event, but a present treasure of great value. However, this treasure of life-in-death (rather than a promise of future Heaven) is something only the “boldest” can grasp, as we see in this poem:


1558

Of Death I try to think like this --
The Well in which they lay us
Is but the Likeness of the Brook
That menaced not to slay us,
But to invite by that Dismay
Which is the Zest of sweetness
To the same Flower Hesperian,
Decoying but to greet us --

I do remember when a Child
With bolder Playmates straying
To where a Brook that seemed a Sea
Withheld us by its roaring
From just the Purple Flower beyond
Until constrained to clutch it
If Doom itself were the result,
The boldest leaped, and clutched it --


Death lies on the “other side” of the waters, as Hades lies on the other bank of the Styx. And we still use the metaphor of “crossing over” to speak of death. But those waters are not merely there to be crossed literally in the final journey, but can be crossed now, psychologically, in the midst of life, and the treasure of Aneas’ Hesperian flower grasped here and now.

The carriage contains three things: the speaker’s self, death and immortality. The experience or perception of immortality, or eternity, only comes into being in the presence of death, in the same way that perception of sound requires silence, and light requires darkness. If an eternal Being desired to realize Its own immortality, It would require the experience of time and mortality – in the same way that we really only experience our own country once we leave it. And here it is the arrival of death which brings the sense of immortality. Not a future assurance of immortality, but a present experience of it.

I do realize the apparent logical contradiction here, but it is nonetheless a perennial common-place of mystical literature from around the world, that the psychological experience of death NOW, is the prerequisite for the awareness of eternity or immortality. As the psychologist, James Hillman says: “Death and existence may exclude each other in rational philosophy, but they are not psychological contraries. Death can be experienced as a state of being, an existential condition”. Suicide and the Soul, p 60. Emily and the mystics know that.


We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

The first thing that the acknowledged presence of death confers is a slowing down or dilation of time and an expansion of perception. Small and previously overlooked aspects of life become obvious and clear once the constant and distracting “rage for living” is stilled, as the entire Zen tradition of Haiku demonstrates.

All this is perfectly in accord with Christianity. As James Carse writes:

“Paul is convinced that the faithful are raised with Jesus, but that resurrection is not something that will occur only after they have died. With what some biblical scholars have regarded as elements of mysticism, Paul asserts that insofar as believers are already united with Christ by faith that they are at present living a kind of resurrection life.” (Death and Existence, p 236).

In short, the eternity conferred by death is available in the midst of life. Living in the presence of death requires some adjustment, but the mystics all assert that the darkness is habitable.


Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight.

- 419

Since this will be too long a post to cover a close-reading of the whole poem, I will jump to the last two stanzas.

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

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

We notice immediately that the grave is “a House” – and houses are for habitation. But the grave is not a terminus – “We paused” – then journeyed on.

And since that pause before the inevitable grave, “Centuries” have passed. Here we see another mystical reference to time dilation or compression. And yet those “Centuries” feel shorter than the day when death-consciousness first dawned on the speaker. Emily is playing here with “degrees of eternity”. The shocking realization that life is inevitably headed towards death has brought the speaker to an experience of the “eternity” or “immortality” which accompanies the present, lived experience of death.

Anyway, this is NOT what the poem is about in any objective or universal sense – because there never is any objective poem – except perhaps in its bare bones of prosodic presentation.

But this is what the poem is about for me.

[Janet Kenny]

I have loved these close reads. I'm away for a week.

I'm not sure what I really think about this process.

I leave the question: isn't there always something beyond meaning and analysis in a first rate poem that leaves explication as a coarse second and a diminisher of the resonating depths of meaning in the poem?

I think these are as fine as they could be but I wonder if even these adequately express the real feelings of the writers. I don't think anyone could have done it better. My sincere admiration for both of you doesn't stop me asking the question.
Till I get back,
Janet

[Mark Allinson]

Janet, I agree. Any poem which can be fully explicated by a critique is a poor poem.

If the poem can be paraphrased and entirely explained, it wasn't a true poem.

Poetry (as many others have said) is that beast which always eludes our conceptual nets.

[RCL]

Mark, thanks for giving this so much attention, and for your alternate reading, with which many would agree. I’m more attuned to her skepticism and penchant for riddles—see her work as magical but not mystical. I basically agree that no net can catch all or even most aspects of great art and admit that I read this one quite differently 30 years ago.

Janet, a pat on the back is welcome, even if highly qualified! I criticize for various reasons, including that I teach literature courses. Also, when my muse is on leave or lazy it at least keeps me interested in the subject. I also learn a few tricks from close analysis.

And from critiques of my own work. I continue to revise based on nudges from readers and other critters.

Cheers,


------------------
Ralph