Because I could not stop for Death: Meter

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Emily Dickinson frequently used a metrical form called common meter. Common meter features alternating lines of eight and six syllables. When analyzed using conventional methods of scansion, this structure is often equivalent to oscillating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. (Recall that an iamb in a metrical foot with one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word “to-day.”) The alternation between four-foot and three-foot lines creates an overall rhythm that has a strong sing-song quality. And indeed, common meter frequently appears in ballads, songs, and popular hymns. For a typical example of common meter, consider the opening stanza:

Be-cause / I could / not stop / for Death –
He kind- / ly stopped / for me –
The Carr- / iage held / but just / Our-selves –
And Im- / mor-tal- / i-ty.

These lines have a lively and even cheerful quality that contrasts starkly with the speaker’s account of the arrival of her own death. It’s also important to note the propulsive momentum of the meter, which drives the poem forward. This momentum partly explains why the speaker “could not stop for Death”—that is, she was too caught up with the progression of her life. Yet the liveliness of the forward propulsion also indicates that, far from resisting death, the speaker accepts its arrival and allows herself to be swept along for the metaphorical carriage ride.

Dickinson is strict with her use of common meter throughout the poem. She only makes one diversion from this metrical pattern, and it’s a powerful one. At the beginning of the fourth stanza, which marks the poem’s midpoint, Dickinson briefly reverses the usual order of lines. That is to say, she switches the lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, creating an inverted 6–8–8–6 syllable pattern for the entire stanza (lines 13–16):

Or ra- / ther – He / passed Us – [iambic trimeter]
The Dews / drew qui- / ver-ing / and Chill – [iambic tetrameter]
For on- / ly Goss- / a-mer, / my Gown – [iambic tetrameter]
My Tipp- / et – on- / ly Tulle – [iambic trimeter]

After three stanzas of strict common meter, this inverted rhythmic pattern comes as a major surprise, since it interrupts the poem’s forward momentum. However, the rhythmic inversion draws the reader’s attention to the shift in perspective the speaker announces in the stanza. In the previous stanza she described passing through a landscape in a carriage with Death. Now the speaker suggests that perhaps Death was not traveling with her through space but rather has simply passed her by in time. We can interpret this inverted perspective as marking a transitional moment in the speaker’s journey, passing as she does from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. In such a reading, death appears as an inverted version of life.

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