Death stops for the speaker like a gentleman caller, and they take a carriage ride past the school, past the fields, past the setting sun, toward eternity. Dickinson wrote this in Amherst, in her white dress, in her room, and it was published only after her death. The poem domesticates the ultimate terror, makes it courteous, almost cozy, and that is what makes it so unsettling. The pause before the house that seemed a swelling of the ground: suddenly we realize where we are. The hymn meter contains vast spaces. Dickinson saw more from her window than most travelers see in a lifetime.