Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

These lines open Emily Dickinson’s poem commonly titled “Because I could not stop for Death,” written during her most productive period in Amherst, Massachusetts (early 1860s) and circulated privately in manuscript rather than published by her in her lifetime. Dickinson often personified abstract forces—Death, Immortality, Eternity—drawing on Protestant New England imagery while revising it into something stranger and more intimate. The poem presents death not as a violent rupture but as a social call: a carriage ride in which the speaker is escorted away from ordinary time. It was first published posthumously, after editors began printing Dickinson’s poems in the 1890s.

The speaker’s inability to “stop” suggests the busyness or unpreparedness of life, while Death’s “kindly” intervention reframes dying as an inevitable appointment rather than an assault. The carriage holding “just Ourselves / And Immortality” compresses a metaphysical drama into a polite, almost courtly scene: Death is a companion, and Immortality rides along as the implied destination or consequence. Dickinson’s calm tone is unsettling; it highlights how death can feel ordinary even as it removes the speaker from human schedules. The opening also establishes the poem’s central tension: the seduction of gentleness versus the irreversible surrender of agency.