Because I could not stop for Death

Death comes as a suitor. He pulls up in a carriage, unhurried, perfectly mannered, and because the speaker has no time to spare he makes the time for her, handing her in beside a silent third passenger named Immortality. What follows is the strangest courtship in American poetry: a slow drive past children circling a schoolyard, past fields of grain that seem to gaze back, past a sun that does not set so much as pass them, until the horses pause before a house that is only a swelling of the ground. Dickinson set all of this to the meter of the hymns she sang as a girl, so the lines rock with the cadence of Sunday worship even as they decline its comfort. She let almost none of her poems out into the world while she lived. This one waited in a drawer to tell you, centuries on, that eternity feels shorter than a single afternoon.