Category: Helen Vendler

The Poem That Wouldn't Die!

9/19/2026

PART 1 is below...and more on "Because I could not stop for Death" will be posted tomorrow!

Today's post, for your delight, is just a hodge-podge of oddments and miscellanea about the poem "Because I could not stop for Death."

You might want to start here: If, by chance dear reader, you missed yesterday's post concerning the mystery surrounding the seldom seen alternate version of the poem from 1924's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, start HERE.

I also alluded to the poem in a whimsical takeoff of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" entitled "The Critics and the Poetess," HERE -- and that post was prompted by an earlier article which featured reviews of Dickinson's work that were published between 1890 and 1900; read it all HERE.

By the way, I came across all of those early reviews in a book from 1968 entitled The Recognition of Emily Dickinson, published by the University of Michigan Press and edited by Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells.

The collection includes reviews from over forty writers, and oddly enough, the poem mentioned most often in the critiques is "I taste a liquor never brewed" -- which I'll cover in a future post. However, "Because I could not stop for Death" is mentioned in a couple of the write-ups.

In an article from 1932, poet and literary critic Allen Tate said this about the poem:

One of the perfect poems in English is 'The Chariot,' and it illustrates better than anything else she wrote the special quality of her mind....If the word 'great' means anything in poetry, this poem is one of the greatest in the English language. The rhythm charges with movement the pattern of suspended action back of the poem. Every image is precise and, moreover, not merely beautiful, but fused with the central idea. Every image extends and intensifies every other. The third stanza especially shows Miss Dickinson's power to fuse, into a single order of perception, a heterogeneous series: the children, the grain, and the setting sun (time) have the same degree of credibility; the first subtly preparing for the last.

It is interesting to note that Tate was referring to Mabel Loomis Todd's edited version of the poem from the 1890 collection Poems. However, in a review from 1938, poet and critic Yvor Winters cited the version found in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924). He said this about the poem:

There are a few curious and remarkable poems representing a mixed theme, of which (Because I could not stop for Death) is perhaps the finest example....In the fourth line we find the familiar device of using a major abstraction in a somewhat loose and indefinable manner; in the last stanza there is the semi-playful pretence (sic) of familiarity with the posthumous experience of eternity, so that the poem ends unconvincingly though gracefully, with a formulary gesture very roughly comparable to that of the concluding couplet of many an Elizabethan sonnet of love; for the rest the poem is a remarkably beautiful poem on the subject of the daily realization of the imminence of death -- it is a poem of departure from life an intensely conscious leave-taking. In so far as it concentrates on the life that is being left behind, it is wholly successful; in so far as it attempts to experience the death to come, it is fraudulent, however exquisitely, and in this it falls below her finest achievement.

Winters references Tate's earlier take on the poem and says this:

"The poem ends in irresolution in the sense that it ends in a statement that is not offered seriously; to praise the poem for this is unsound criticism."

Here's an odd connection to the poem:

On Substack, someone posed the question, "What's the oldest book you own?" That query prompted me to look through the old books we have around the house. In a future post, I'll share info on some of the old books we have (some shown at the left); however, for now I'll mention just one of them.

As I was looking through the books, one slim volume jumped out at me, Poems by Rupert Brooke. My wife, Brooke, was named after the poet! Plus -- years later -- we named our first cat after the poet too -- "Rupert." ; )

The book was given to my wife's grandfather, Hugh Johnstone, from his sister-in-law -- and that's a picture of Hugh in the background in the pic below.

Right when I opened to the book's table of contents, one poem jumped out at me, "Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire." I immediately thought that he had written a poem similar to Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death." But then I read the complete line in that opens the poem: "Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire / Of watching you." Oh good grief -- it was a goofy love poem. LOL.

Info on the Rupert Brooke Society is HERE -- although the site does not appear to be active. However, there is a link on the site to a Facebook group.

Some of his poems are HERE.

PART 2 added on 9/20/26:

In addition to the mystery of the altered version of "Because I could not stop for Death" that appeared in 1924's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (discussed in my post from 9/18, HERE), the poem involves another curiosity:

Why did the first editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson omit the fourth stanza from the poem when they published it in 1890?

Helen Vendler, a writer and the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University, discussed this bafflement in her book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. She began, though, with thoughts on the title bestowed on the poem by Higginson and Todd, "The Chariot":

"When this poem was first published in 1890, the editors gave it the vaguely archaic and religious title, 'The Chariot.' They wished to remind readers of the chariot sent from heaven to 'translate' Elijah (who did not die) to eternity."

Vendler adds, "Nothing could be more misleading with respect to Dickinson's poem, which is about the apprehension of real death, offering no rescue."

Next, Vendler addresses the elephant in the poem -- er, I suppose I should say the elephant out of the poem -- the missing fourth stanza:

"It is the only one which is not arranged as a ballad stanza, 4 - 3 - 4 - 3; the first line has only three beats 'Or rather -- He passed Us --'. Yet, like other 'mislineated' stanzas, this one could have been regularized:

Or rather -- He passed us -- the Dews
Grew quivering and Chill -
For only Gossamer, my Gown --
My Tippet -- only Tulle --

It could not have been only the 'missing' foot, so easily restored to the first line from it Dickinsonian 'misplacement' in the second, that made the editors cut this stanza. Something in it disturbed them...."

So what was it about that fourth stanza?

"Dickinson's first editors wished to suggest that her escort was sent by God's will, bringing along 'Immortaiity' as the reward for the journey. An indifferent and even malevolent escort, conducting her into an apprehnesion ratified by the sunk cornice, did not fit their conception of the poem. Had they dared, they might even have revised Dickinson's grim closing word 'Eternity.' 'Immortality' is glorious; 'Eternity' (as Andrew Marvell knew, writing of 'deserts of Eternity'), chilling."

Note that Todd and Higginson even changed the sinking cornice in the poem to a "reassuringly visible" mound. Also, take a look at Vendler's observation on Dickinson's use of pronouns in the poem:

"After the first stanza, the separate pronouns, 'I' and 'He' have fused in the untroubled mutuality of 'We,' the pronoun presumably including the third passenger in the Carriage, 'Immortality.' Only the shock of the penultimate stanza frightens the speaker out of the comfortably spoken 'We" back to an appalled 'i.'"

As chilling as that cunning shift to "eternity." I've got goose bumps!

And now for something completely different: Look what I found on Netflix. LOL -- I can't even recall what I was searching for when I found this:

Could this story have been inspired by Dickinson's poem?

Well, according to what I found, the movie is a 1921 Swedish silent film directed by and starring Victor Sjöström, based on the 1912 novel Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! (Körkarlen) by Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf.

The novel was commissioned by a Swedish association as a means of public education about tuberculosis) and it’s been dramatized for the screen twice in Sweden and once in France, under various English titles of The Phantom Carriage, The Phantom Chariot, The Stroke of Midnight, and Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness.

I also learned this: In some European folklore the last dead person of the year in a village becomes the charioteer of death for the next year.

At the right: A poster for La Charrette Fantome, the 1939 French drama based on Lagerlöf's novel, directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Pierre Fresnay, Marie Bell, Louis Jouvet and Micheline Francey.

This movie was due to be screened at the first Cannes Film Festival scheduled for September 1939, but cancelled due to the outbreak of the Second World War.

More on The Phantom Carriage:

The film is notable for its special effects, its innovative narrative structure with flashbacks within flashbacks, and for having been a major influence on the works of Ingmar Bergman -- plus, it is generally considered to be one of the central works in the history of Swedish cinema. Also it is considered by many to be the first horror film due to its atmosphere and its impact on later entries in the genre.

I have written a number of parodies of "Because I could not stop for Death." Here was my first:

Because I could not stop for Debt –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Wagon carried just Ourselves –
But also Bankruptcy.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My Mastercard and my Visa too,
For his cold C.O.D. –

We passed a Church – where churchmice strove –
Scampering – in the field–
Trying to collect what crumbs they could –
To set a decent meal.

We passed before a House that seemed
In utter disrepair –
There was no Roof to shelter heads –
The walls were stark and bare.

Since then –'tis Billing Cycles – and yet
Feels shorter than a Sale
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Approved Credit –

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