Emily Dickinson on Death

Author(s): RUTH FLANDERS MCNAUGHTON

Source: Prairie Schooner, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 1949), pp. 203-214
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40624107
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 Emily Dickinson on Death
RUTH FLANDERS MCNAUGHTON

and faith waged a constant battle in Emily Dicki

mind. Sometimes her faith overcame the tyrant death, bu
times it wavered. Once she wrote of "Faith, the Exper
of our Lord!" At another time she witnessed death defeated:

There's triumph in the room

When that old imperator, Death,
By faith is overcome.

But always, whichever won or lost the battle for the time being, death
remained for Emily the great dictator, the ever-present imperator, a
force to be reckoned with and treated with respect. Of her approxi-
mately fifteen hundred surviving poems, at least one-sixth deal directly
with Death (a word which she almost always capitalized as she seldom
did faith), and many more bow to him in passing. Likewise, many of
Emily Dickinson's letters, a number of which were messages of con-
dolence, speak of death. Naturally those written to friends who had
lost members of their immediate family usually spoke of immortality
with fervor and mentioned faith with reassurance. These expressions
of orthodox belief in a reunion with loved ones are the most conventional
statements in all of her writing.
Numerous letters of great interest are those addressed to friends
and relatives at the times that Emily herself was grieving over a loss
at the hands of implacable death. Her father died when she was
forty-three years old; she wrote at once to her mentor Colonel Higgin-
son, begging him to assure her that "the arm of the Lord is [not] short-
ened, [so] that it cannot save." Eight years later her mother, who had
been an invalid for seven years following a paralytic stroke, died. Emily
wrote more calmly of death then: "She slipped from our fingers like
a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called 'the
infinite.'" But she continues, skeptically: "We don't know where she
is, though so many tell us." Wavering back and forth between dis-
belief and faith, she adds immediately following the above statement:

I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker - that the

One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to sur-
prise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence. . . .
I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea. . . .

Here her idea of the infinite as a "drift" and then again a "sea" seems
analagous to Whitman's conception of the "float." Strange that two
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 PRAIRIE SCHOONER

such different poets, writing entirely unknown to each other, often

appear to have similar ideas of life and death and the nature of the
universe. Emily, like Whitman, was not a professed Christian nor th
membef of any church, so that when death came to rob her, she could
only accept its tyranny questioningly: "A soft 'Where is she?' is all tha
is left of our loved mother."
Replying to a letter of sympathy from her beloved cousins, Louisa
and Frances Norcross, on the death of a friend in 1884, Emily Dickinson
wrote :

Thank you, dears, for the sympathy. I hardly dare to know that I have
lost another friend, but anguish finds it out. ... I work to drive the awe
away, yet awe impels the work. . . . Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy
impersonal, but then discover that he .was the cup from which we drank it,
itself as yet unknown.

Is she here making death synonymous with ecstasy, the beatific union
with the God of the mystic transfigured? The passage is certainly
ambiguous. Is death the antecedent of he, and ecstasy the antecedent
of it? And are the two one and the same? What is "unknown" -
death or ecstasy or both? The answer is a riddle; but at least it is
certain that the thought unknown echoes as a refrain through all the
three hundred or more poems on death, as well as through the letters.
When Frazer A. Stearns, an Amherst boy, was killed at Newbern during
the Civil War, Emily wrote to her cousins of how he died, "his big
heart shot away by a 'minie ball!' " She described in detail his funeral
and how his family and friends took his death, and as a postscript added:

Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few
persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with
one's own, now would be many medicines.
'Tis dangerous to value, for only the precious can alarm. I noticed Robert
Browning had made another poem, and was astonished - till I remembered
that I, myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps. Every day life feels
mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.

How often, alone and introspective, Emily the recluse "sang off charnel
steps," marvelling at life's and death's stupendousness, marvelling that
death makes life feel mightier! I think it was the miracle of death,
more than any other aspect of it, that captured her imagination. Cer-
tainly her attitude toward it was not that of the orthodox Calvinist of
the New England which likes to claim her exclusively as "seeing New
Englandly." Her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, in her Life and
Letters of Emily Dickinson, wrote of Emily's religion:

The incident of her dear friend and parson, Dr. Dwight, attempting to
convert her, remains as a cherished family annal, for she could not be brought

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 EMILY DICKINSON ON DEATH

to consider God as an enemy, or herself as hateful in his sight. What

contrast her own cry: "Could pathos compete with that simple statement,
'Not that we first loved Him, but that He first loved us'?"

Mrs. Austin Dickinson, the sister Sue to whom Emily often

her poems, wrote at the time of the poet's death a tribute which
peared in the Springfield Republican:

With no creed, no formal faith, hardly knowing the name of dogma

she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of the old saints, wi
the firm steps of the martyrs who sing while they suffer.

When she was only eighteen and attending the Mt. Holyoke Fe
Seminary, Emily wrote in a letter to a schoolgirl friend:

I tremble when I think how soon the weeks and days of this term w
all have been spent, and my fate will be sealed, perhaps. I have neglect
the one thing needful [italics are Emily's] when all were obtaining it, a
I may never, never again pass through such a season as was granted us l
winter. Abiah, you may be surprised to hear me speak as I do, knowin
that I express no interest in the all-important subject, but I am not happ
and T regret that last term, when that golden opportunity was mine, tha
did not give up and become a Christian. It is not now too late, so my frien
tell me, so my offended conscience whispers, but it is hard for me to giv
up the world. . . . / am one of the lingering bad ones, and so do I slink aw
and pause and ponder, and ponder and pause, and do work without knowin
why, not surely, for this brief world, and more sure it is not for heaven, an
I ask what this message means that they ask for so very eagerly. You kno
of this depth and fulness, will you try to tell me about it?

Even the usual flurry of religious fervor so often characteristic of ado

cence failed to overcome her stubborn skepticism sufficiently tha
was willing to "accept Christ" in the fundamentalist manner. Bec
the above-quoted passage so perfectly reveals Emily's constantly waver
attitude toward the church all through her life, I have thought
sufficient importance to quote at such great length. The question
the end of it, so earnest and sincere, is typical. The irony of pla
herself in the category of the "lingering bad ones" - this too is ty
To the end of her life, Emily puzzled over the mystery and mirac
life, time, eternity, God, and death. As she grew older, her faith
some form of reincarnation or resurrection, her belief in immort
as we commonly define the term in the Christian manner, seem
grow. Unfortunately, the chronology of her poems has not been e
lished definitely enough that we can trace accurately the gradual chang
in her attitude. However, the later letters do express a growing
in a life of some sort after death.
Her friend the Reverend Charles Wadsworth died in 1882. Sho
after his death, Emily exchanged several letters with Mr. Charle

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 PRAIRIE SCHOONER

Clark, a close friend of this man whom she had loved and worshipped
from afar for twenty-eight years. "In an intimacy of many years with
the beloved clergyman, I have never spoken with one who knew him,"
she wrote to Mr. Clark. "He was my shepherd from 'little girl' hood
[she had met him in 1854 when she was twenty-four and he was forty-
three], and I cannot imagine a world without him, so noble was he
always- so fathomless- so gentle." She asked news of the minister's
favorite son "Willie," saying, "How irreparable should there be no per-
petuation of a nature so treasured!" This exclamation of grief seems
to imply that Emily believed that the father would survive only through
his children. This greatest loss suffered at the hands of "the postponeless
Creature" broke down her usual reticence in writing of the man she
loved. She continued the correspondence with Mr. Clark and wrote
to him after the death of his brother: "Are you certain there is another
life? When overwhelmed to know, I fear that few are sure."
But in April, 1886, in the last letter that Emily Dickinson wrote, so
far as is known, she said, speaking of "Mr. Wadsworth," as she called
him: " 'Going home,' was he not an aborigine of the sky?" Also, shortly
before May 15, 1886, the day of her death, she sent a cryptic message
consisting of two words. "Little Cousins, - Called back. Emily.'*
Did she believe in immortality in the sense of a life after deatn in
which we meet again our friends of earth? Did she, at the last, look
forward to reunion with the man she had loved so long in secret? Or
was it of herself as the mystic bride of Christ that she wrote in the
impassioned "A wife a daybreak I shall be"? There are as many dif-
ferent answers to these questions as there are critics and readers of Emily
Dickinson. It is true that she wrote one poem visioning herself as
"Bride of the Father and the Son, Bride of the Holy Ghost." On the
other hand, the evidence of the letters reveals clearly that, like many a
twentieth-century agnostic, Emily Dickinson wavered between faith and
doubt, hope and fear, and that, like many an avowed humanist, she
longed more for her lover than for Christ, both in this world and the
next, if there be the latter.
Having a keen mind, Emily Dickinson read widely. Plato, Shake-
speare, Sir Thomas Browne, the Brownings, the Bronte sisters, D
Quincey, Keats, George Eliot, George Sand, Hawthorne, and Emerson
were among her favorites. She also read history, geography, and astron
omy, and, through her reading and from the talk of her brother and
her father, who were lawyers, she had some acquaintance with Disraeli
and Gladstone. She certainly read the Bible, too, but not as a revela-
tion of God, for she wrote of it in a poem that it is "an antique volum
Written by faded men."
She also followed the news and read the Springfield Republican more
religiously than she ever did the Bible; and many of her poems, especially

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 EMILY DICKINSON ON DEATH

those on death, must have been inspired by news stories of tragedies

as drownings, men buried in mine shafts, men killed in battle. S
the literary magazines of the day, such as the Atlantic and Scr
and the popular novels, many of which she borrowed from friends,
her stern father frowned on such frivolous books. All this
gave her a point of view quite different from that of the avera
England "gentlewoman" of the mid-nineteenth century. She co
more accept unquestionably the orthodox religion of her austere
than she could disregard the evidence of her own senses, so ke
discern all natural phenomena, including that of physical death.

Dust is the only secret,

Death the only one
You cannot find out about
In his native town: . . .

This stanza is certainly a clear statement incapable of ambiguous inter-

pretation. Others in the poems are less forthright, of course; and the
battle still rages, in professional and scholarly magazines, in university
classrooms, and wherever people take an interest in poetry: Was Emily
devoutly and mystically religious or was she an avowed agnostic? My
answer is that she was an agnostic, but certainly not an atheist. She
never denied the possibility of a God who calls us back to Him through
death; nor could she ever accept completely the road to salvation offered
by the church through the vicarious atonement of Christ. I believe this
position can be supported not only by evidence in the letters but also
by many of the ideas expressed in her poetry. Emily Dickinson did not
fear death, because she could not believe in eternal damnation; rather,
she looked forward to it as an adventure, the passing through a door,
the answer to a riddle, the end to her own private Calvary, and perhaps -
just perhaps- reunion with all her friends and relatives and especially
with the man she loved.
As she grew older, Emily seemed almost to woo death, and she spoke
more and more affectionately of "that old imperator," sometimes half
in jest: "Ah! dainty - dainty Death!" she wrote to a friend. "Ah! demo-
cratic Death! Grasping the proudest zinnia from my purple garden,-
the deep to his bosom calling the serfs child! Say, is he everywhere?
Where shall I hide my things? Who is alive? The woods are dead.
Is Mrs. H. [Mrs. S. G. Holland, to whom the letter was written] alive?
Annie and Katie - are they below, or received to nowhere?" This whim-
sical passage about dainty Death always reminds me paradoxically of
Whitman's chant to death in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomed," in which he apostrophizes death: "delicate Death, lovely and
soothing death," death - the "strong deliveress." The image of death
as delicate or dainty is certainly contrary to the popular conception of

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 PRAIRIE SCHOONER

the gruesome death's-head, the skeleton, the four horsemen of the Apoca
lypse, death the avenger. Emily never seemed to associate death wi
hell, certainly a common practice in her day, although she often referre
to her own private hell as "Empress of Calvary," meaning her renunc
tion of earthly love, and in one poem she spoke of the Crucifixion
only one of many crucifixions. On the other hand, she often mentio
Heaven, Paradise, and Eden as possibilities of "the white exploit," dea
In fact, in her metaphysic all the following terms are practically synony
mous: death, love, eternity, immortality, time, now, then. Disrega
of distinctions of time and space places Emily Dickinson in the compa
of the mystics, but in the tradition of the intellectual mystic, such as Si
Thomas Browne, not that of Blake, the emotional seer of visions; a
in the tradition of the lover of nature's minutiae, "our little kinsme
such as* St. Francis of Assisi, not that of St. Teresa, the bride of Chr
The mystic who loses himself in ecstatic union with God is anestheti
to the concrete details of life and death; he is too concerned with hea
to observe and love the minutiae of earth - the robin, the bee, the dande
lion, the sunset, a dead child too soon "called back." He is too worr
about the salvation of the soul to notice the changes wrought in the aspe
of the body by death's visitation, as Emily so carefully did.
Emily Dickinson's curiosity about death began when as a child sh
noticed that "people went away and never came back." She tells of th
in one of her earlier poems. This interest in the phenomenon of dea
continued throughout her life, as is evident in her poems as well as h
letters.
The poems on death fall into four classes: first, those dealing with
the physical fact of death, often describing in minute detail the act of
dying and the appearance of the corpse, among these appearing several
in which the poet imagines herself as dying or dead; second, those dram-
atizing the pageantry of death - "the bustle after death," - the funeral,
the funeral procession, the burial; third, imaginative descriptions of the
grave, "the apartment deep" where dwell the dead, often including
pictures of the tomb and the coffin; and last, the poems visioning immor-
tality, the life after the resurrection which Emily so longed to believe in,
yet could never be completely sure of.
The images Emily Dickinson conceived to describe the physical fact
of death show close observation coupled with a seemingly insatiable
curiosity about death. This curiosity may seem morbid to some, but to
me it is simply another indication of her intense awareness of the detail
of any phenomenon in which she was vitally interested. Here are some
of the vivid and startling images - a few abstract, but most concrete -
that she uses to describe the body after life is gone: the eyes glaze once;
the soldered mouth; granite lip; fastened lips; adamantine fingers; quiet
nonchalance of death; the Spirit laying off an overcoat of clay; resigned

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 EMILY DICKINSON ON DEATH

the Loom; this latest leisure; a fly buzzed twice; just an Asterisk; q
Dust; the final inch; repealed from observation; concluded lives; c
in miracle; death annuls the power to communicate; an unclaimed
and jacket indicate a drowning; suspend the breath; death-warrants
sign to crucifix or block; cool forehead; indolent housewife; too co
warm with sun; too stiff to bended be; this agate; beyond the ho
touch; this silver reticence; this horizontal one that will not lift it
the solid calm; this meek apparelled thing.
One of Emily Dickinson's most arresting descriptions of the ac
dying appears in a letter: "Her dying feels to me like many kind
cold- at times electric, at times benumbing- then a trackless waste
has never told." Comparable to this passage in vividness is the po
beginning "I felt a funeral in my brain"; or more nearly similar
imagery is "It Was Not Death, for I Stood Up," a poem which descr
minutely alternate sensations of fever and chill.
It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl, -
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.
And the final stanza:
But most like chaos, - stopless, cool, -
Without a chance or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.

Other carefully observed images representing what it may be like

to die are the following: a throe upon the features; a hurry in the breath;
agony - motionless as peace; I'm feeling for the air; beads upon the fore-
head by homely anguish strung. In one poem, Emily tells of seeing a
dying eye "run round and round a room," seemingly in search of some-
thing. Then it became cloudier and finally "obscure with fog," and was
"soldered down" without disclosing the vision it perhaps perceived. In
another poem in which the poet expresses a wish to know "just how
he suffered," she uses an unusual image: "he ceased human nature."
She wants to know all the details of his dying; and I infer the "he" to
whom she refers must be the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, for the
poem is quite similar to the same questions asked in a letter to a friend
of his after the minister's death. This is, of course, conjecture, but
certainly a possible interpretation. In the poem of inquiry she is espe-
cially anxious to know:
Was he afraid, or tranquil?
Might he know
How conscious consciousness could grow,
Till love that was, and love too blest to be,
Meet - and the junction be Eternity?

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 PRAIRIE SCHOONER

Still another imaginative re-creation of what it may be like to die

is given in the emotionally charged "The sun kept setting, setting still."
In this poem Emily imagines herself dying. It is noon, but for her the
light is fading. The dusk kept "dropping, dropping still"; yet there was
no dew on the grass - "only on my forehead," she savs, and then con-
tinues:

My feet kept drowsing, drowsing still,

My fingers were awake.

These lines recall Plato's account of Socrates' description of his sensations

of growing numbness after drinking the hemlock.
There are numerous other poems on the subject of dying, but the ones
already quoted are typical of the quality of the imagery which Emily
Dickinson employs to give us an idea of what she thought dying must
be like.
Death calls; there is the period of speculative watching beside the
corpse (a practice almost abandoned in this age of sterile mortuaries);
then follows "the bustle after death," the funeral and the procession to
the graveyard; and finally the burial. "Mixing bells and palls" is one
of the images the poet uses to make us see, hear, and feel the dramatic
tension, the oddly assorted mixture of elation, excitement, pity, and fear
that makes "lacerating tune" as background music to the moving picture
of "the éclat of death." Emily must surely have enjoyed funerals- not
as the perennially morbid mourner does, gloating over the passing of
others, while he remains hale and hearty - but because of the show. The
best-known of the poems describing funerals is "One Dignity Delays
for All," in which she calls the hearse a coach, describes the death knell
and the respectful raising of many hats - all the obsequies with "pomp
surpassing ermine." Less well-known, but equally exciting, is a poem
in which Emily imagines herself the one in the hearse:

The carriage held but just ourselves

And immortality.

She depicts the slow drive to the graveyard, the passing of a school where
children were wrestling, the fields of "gazing grain" (as though even
the grain stopped to gape), the setting sun. Then came the pause before
a "swelling of the ground," and the denouement:

Since then 'tis centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

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 EMILY DICKINSON ON DEATH

The graveyard poems, I think, are unique, because of the gay an

tender delight with which Emily almost always speaks of the grave
one she says:

The grave my little cottage is,

Where, keeping house for thee,
I make my parlor orderly,
And lay the marble tea.

In another place she describes the grave as "cordial"; and in anoth

coffins are made to seem most desirable abodes:

Sweet safe houses - glad gay houses -

From here, Emily goes on to praise "lids of steel on lids of marble," the
"brooks of plush in banks of satin" where neither "bald death" nor "bold
sickness" may enter in. Elsewhere she speaks of going to thank a friend,
but "she slept." Her bed was a "funnelled stone," and it had "nosegays
at the head and foot." In another poem, she calls graves "alabaster
chambers"; the coffin has "rafter of satin, and roof of stone."
In still another poem, puzzling in its implications, Emily admonishes
us, apparently advocating suicide if life proves too nerve-wracking:

If your Nerve deny you,

Go above the Nerve:
You can lean against the Grave
If he fear to swerve.

The way in which the thought of the grave constantly haunted her
until sometimes she longed to be free of it for a while is described in
the following poem:

Bereaved of all, I went abroad,

No less bereaved to be
Upon a new peninsula, -
The grave preceded me,
Obtained my lodgings ere myself,
And when I sought my bed,
The grave it was, reposed upon
The pillow for my head.
I waked, to find it first awake,
I rose, - it followed me:
I tried to drop it in the crowd,
To lose it in the sea,

In cups of artificial drowse

To sleep its shape away, -
The grave was finished, but the spade
Remained in memory.

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 PRAIRIE SCHOONER

The poems on immortality are the most paradoxical of all Emi

Dickinson's work. They have caused almost as many bitter debates a
her little-known love story. Those under the heading "Time and Et
nity" which appeared in the early editions (brought out by Mable Loom
Todd with the help of Colonel Wentworth Higginson in the ear
1890's, a few years after Emily's death) are much more orthodox tha
those in the 1935 collection, Bolts of Melody. Typical of the earlier
appearing poems is the one which is so frequently used in antholog
and textbooks, "I Never Saw a Moor," with its categorical statement
surety:

I never spoke with God,

Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

In Bolts of Melody we find less certitude. These are "the poems she
wrote in her fullest maturity," according to Millicent Todd Bingham's
statement in the Introduction. This fact is ascertained by a comparison
of the handwriting with that of the letters. In the later poetry, life is
an "ablative estate," an existence to and from - but to and from where ?
There lies the mystery. Emily states in one of these poems that life
is so sweet because "it will not come again." And in the same poem
she goes on to add:

Believing what we don't believe

Does not exhilarate.

Bending over a problem, she writes of a larger problem that comes:

"Wherefore, my baffled fingers Time Eternity?" Also she questions
the doctrine of original sin, answering the question, "Sown in corrup-
tion?" with an indignant "By no means!" "Apostle is askew," she
insists, and points to a contradictory verse in the Bible: "Corinthians 1:15
narrates a circumstance or two!"
The Devil, she writes, has ability, and had he integrity too, we could
admire him wholeheartedly. Of our Savior she writes that He "must
have been a docile Gentleman"; and to her Heavenly Father she prays:

Though to trust us seem to us

More respectful - "we are dust."

Then she concludes in a manner most unorthodox:

We apologize to Thee
For Thine own Duplicity.

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 EMILY DICKINSON ON DEATH

Elsewhere she characterizes the deity as "a disappointing God" w

us "to call again" when it would be a "kinder Sword" simply
"Thou shalt not."
Other doctrines of redemption, held by the Calvinist church, bothered
her. In The Single Hound, also a group of poems withheld from publi-
cation until the twentieth century, Emily questions, "Who are 'the Father
and the Son'?" and concludes:

We blush, that Heaven if we achieve,

Event ineffable -
We shall have shunned, until ashamed
To own the Miracle.

In the final analysis, Emily Dickinson found that love does more
than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. "Love makes us 'heavenly'
without our trying in the least. 'Tis easier than our Saviour," she wrote
to Mrs. Samuel Bowles after the death of Mr. Bowles. And in one of
her later quatrains she speaks of death as something which disembodies
as absence does; then she concludes, saying just the opposite of what she
had said in an earlier poem, "Superstition helps, as well as love." But
note that she calls it superstition, not religion, or faith, or God. She also
writes that even "the wise cannot conjecture" about death, for

The bravest die

As ignorant of their resumption
As you or I.

The poems expressing greatest hope for immortality are the love
poems. When Emily Dickinson does speculate on death and resurrec-
tion as conjoined, she almost always likens the great metamorphosis to
dawn rather than to sunset as so many poets have done* She once wrote
that " Till Death' is narrow loving." And again that Life is Love and
"Love hath Immortality." "A Wife at Daybreak," often likened to
Browning's "Prospice," expresses her highest conviction of spiritual re-
union with the lover she renounced in this world because he was married,
a minister, and a father. But more than counter-balancing the poems
expressing unquestioning belief in a life after death are many tinged
with doubt, such as

Eternity is ample,
And quick enough, if true.

That ever-recurrent if I Of the existence of paradise, Emily says that "All

we know Is the uncertain certainty."
As late as 1884, just a year before her death, she wrote to Mr. Clark:
"To be certain we were to meet our lost would be a vista of reunion who

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 PRAIRIE SCHOONER

of us could bear?" And again: "These thoughts disquiet me, and the
great friend is gone who could solace them." To her cousins she wrote,
as early at 1863:

Life is death we're lengthy at,

Death the hinge to life.

What does the poet mean by describing life as a slow death and death
as the hinge to life? Isn't her meaning simply that all during our life
we are in a sense dying, that death is the hinge òn which life turns
because only through death do we learn the true significance of this
life by passing through the door to the after-life? "Eternity is now,"
she once wrote. Death is just an incident along the way, an opening
leading from a small room to a larger room, to "Escape from Circum-
stance." Death for Emily meant daybreak, sunrise in the "Ether Acre"
to which she rode to "meet the Earl!" It is not to be feared for our-
selves, but only because of its power to take from us those whom we
love. When they have all gone on before, then we can rejoice at being
"called back" by death to that Paradise we possibly have known before.
The reader of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters will interpret
those on death and immortality in accordance with his own predilections,
but if he reads carefully and with an open mind, he can but admit that
for Emily death remained the greatest of all paradoxes and an insoluble
enigma to those this side of the door. And the brave and the wise, and
those without the consolation of religious dogma, will learn, from the
"vital light" she left behind, that death may be experienced as life's
greatest adventure:

We never know we go - when we are going

We jest and shut the door,-
Fate following behind us bolts it
And we accost no more.

214

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