Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Michael Staub (essay date 1984)

Michael Staub (essay date 1984)

”A Look at ‘Because I could not stop for Death,’”Dickinson Studies, No. 54, Bonus 1984, pp. 43-46.

[In the following essay, Staub demonstrates some ways in which Dickinson exposes the sentimentality of mourning conventions in “Because I could not stop for Death.”]

In January 1863, shortly after Louise and Frances Norcross were orphaned by the death of their father, Emily Dickinson included in her letter of consolation this verse:

It is not dying hurts us so,—
‘Tis living hurts us more;
But dying is a different way,
A kind, behind the door,—
The southern custom of the bird
That soon as frosts are due
Adopts a better latitude.
We are the birds that stay,
The shiverers round farmers' doors,
For whole reluctant crumb
We stipulate, till pitying snows
Persuade our feathers home.(1) (J 335)

In accordance with the consolation literature of her day, Dickinson softens the...

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