Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

"Because I could not stop for death—"

(1890)

Emily Dickinson

(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

Notes

16  tippet:

tippet (Merriam-Webster) 1: a long hanging end of cloth attached to a sleeve, cap, or hood 2: a shoulder cape of fur or cloth often with hanging ends. tippet (Encyclopædia Britannica) Tippet, long, narrow, cloth streamer, usually white, worn around the arm above the elbow, with the long end hanging down to the knee or to the ground. These graceful tippets, worn in the late 14th century by both men and women, developed out of the long flaps created by the narrow 14th-century sleeve. In the 15th century, the designation tippet came to signify a long streamer (also called liripipe) extending from a hat or hood. Tippet may also refer to an 18th-century capelike or scarflike garment worn around the neck and hanging down in front; this tippet could be made of gauze, crepe, lace, velvet, fur, or feathers. [...]

What was the United States like that Whitman and Dickinson were born into?
Source: Ed Folsom, Selected American Authors: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

EMILY DICKINSON is born in 1830, the year President Andrew Jackson signs the Great Removal act, forcibly resettling all Indians west of the Mississippi; Jackson addresses the nation, "What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute?" The Sac and Fox tribes, over objections of chief Black Hawk, give up all their lands east of Mississippi River ; Choctaws do the same; other tribes like Chickasaws follow suit within a year or two. Only the Cherokees, literate farmers who wanted citizenship, hold out. In 1832, Black Hawk leads some Sac and Fox back across Mississippi into Illinois --they are eventually ambushed and massacred in the Michigan Territory , and Black Hawk is turned over to U.S. authorities by the Winnebago Indians. Major Congressional debate is over whether or not the sale of Western lands should be restricted; Western senators sense a plot by Eastern business interests to close the West so that cheap labor stays in the Northeast where factories demand low-paid workers. Joseph Smith publishes "The Book of Mormon", based on his deciphering of golden plates he claimed to have found on an upstate New York mountain, detailing the true church as descended through American Indians who were apparently part of the lost tribes of Israel (an idea quite common in early 19th-century America). The next year, 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville arrives in the U.S. and begins his journey around the country that would result in his massive book of observations, "Democracy in America ," including his analysis of “the three races in America ” (black, red, and white). Nat Turner, a Virginia slave who had visions from God of white spirits and black spirits engaged in bloody combat, leads a revolt with seven other slaves, killing his master and his family; with 75 insurgent slaves, he killed more than 50 whites on a two-day journey to Jerusalem, Virginia, where he was hanged along with sixteen of his companions (many other blacks are killed during the manhunt for Turner). The Turner Insurrection was the stuff of nightmares for white Southerners, who passed increasingly severe slave codes. The song "America" is sung for the first time in Boston on July 4.

Poetry

Poems (1890)

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 –

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Vocabulary

Sample Student Responses to Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death—"

Response 1: 

Reference

Reference

Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. Print.

Further Reading

Eberwein, Jane Donahue, Stephanie Farrar, and Cristanne Miller, eds. Dickinson in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Iowa: U of Iowa P, 2015. Print.

Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, eds. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998. Print.

Griffith, Clark. The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Print.

Kirby, Joan. Emily Dickinson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Print.

Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Print.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. Print.

Mitchell, Domhnall. Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000. Print.

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1974. Print.

Smith, Martha Nell, and Mary Loeffelholz, eds. A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Print.

Socarides, Alexandra. Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. Oxford: OUP, 2014. Print.

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Last updated March 14, 2018