RIP: Emily Dickinson - Dec. 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886

Photo: June 2010; Amherst, Massachusetts

Following Emily Dickinson's death, a cache of some 1800 poems was discovered in her home (a small number of these -- ten or twelve -- had been published in her lifetime).  Despite this vast number, and despite the vast number of them that I love, I can actually winnow out a favorite:


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 grew 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 but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses' heads

Were toward eternity.

I love to say this poem aloud, and when I do I pronounce 'civility' civili-tay. And I must say too that I'm a little embarrassed that I prefer a version tinkered up by a couple of editors after the poet's death ... and in which version the third stanza reads:

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

But totally leaves out what is Emily's lovely next stanza in the original:

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

(The paperback of Dickinson poems I bought in 1969 in Germany contains the tinkered version of this poem, and I never ran across or noticed the original version until a couple years back; I was sent by this newly discovered stanza to my dictionary:  "tippet - a long hanging end of cloth attached to a sleeve, cap, or hood.")
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P.S. It seems somehow disloyal, too, to prefer one of the edited poems since it was probably edited by a woman named Mabel Todd Loomis -- a free-spirited woman who had a long affair with Emily's married brother, Austin, causing, along with the surprisingly adulterous Austin, much disapproval and smashed spirits within the Dickinson family; Emily was particularly fond of her beloved brother and particularly unfond of Mabel Todd Loomis .