Because I could not stop for Death

I think that's important.

And the poem I'm going to focus on, the main one, is the poem, Because I Could Not Stop for Death.

It's a poem 479 in the Collected Poetry.

So I'll begin by reading the whole poem, and then I'll walk through it stanza by stanza, sharing with you what it evokes in me spiritually to help you to see what it might evoke in you, like Lectio Divina.

So this is the poem.

Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.

The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

We slowly drove.

Like, I'm all out of love by Air Supply.

Did you read that poem by Emily Dickinson, Because I Could Not Stop for Death?

Yeah, I read that in college.

I had never read

[laughs]

Despite that, so we're gonna have to take a look at Because I Could Not Stop for Death.

Hm.

All right, so this is poem 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.

But as you'll see, she's often using slant rhyme or off rhyme.

And this one leads us on a bit of a journey, and the opening line has this sort of sense of-- it's almost something that we might say, you know, if like, if we saw an accident that happened just as we passed through an intersection, "Because I could not stop for death, I drove calmly on," or something like that.

[laughs] Um, it, it's almost modern in, in how it's phrased, but then we realize that Dickinson is really in the nineteenth century, and she, she does unusual things here, like for instance, personifying the figure of death.

And just look at how death is portrayed in this, uh, lovely poem.

It's only a few stanzas long.

"Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.

The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

We slowly drove.

Hit me.

Um, her most famous poem, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, um, which talks as, about death as a gentleman.

Mm.

And for any of our Buffy addicts out there, little bit of foreshadowing.

Sir Walter Scott himself had translated the story under the title The Wild Huntsman, which would draw a connection to Scott's good friend, Washington Irving.

Another possibility is the poem Tam O'Shanter, in which a drunk farmer riding home one night is chased by a coven of witches, only escaping their grasp when he crosses a bridge.

The similarity here is clear, even if the headless equestrian spirit himself did not appear.

Finally, there are the Rubezahl legends of Johann Karl August Musaus about a mountain spirit or gnome popular in German folklore.

He used to haunt their neighborhood, end quote.

The story involved a visitation to a young man's house and the young man dying shortly thereafter, indicating that this was a Dullahan story heard by Irving in a memorable experience just a few years before he wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

[piano music] We know that this legend of the Dullahan and his death coach had arrived in America by the later 19th century as Emily Dickinson's poem Because I Could Not Stop for Death seems a clear reflection of the tale, with death arriving in a slow carriage for the speaker.

But there's also evidence to suggest that these legends had reached American shores far earlier, and that perhaps Irving had heard them much earlier than that day in the Derbyshire cave.