SOURCE: “A Look at ‘Because I could not stop for Death,’” in 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) 

(J335)

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