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Time versus eternity

One of the central motifs in the poem relates to the tension between time and eternity. Over the course of the poem’s six stanzas, the speaker transitions from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. Although the speaker describes her journey as a passage through physical space, her transition from life to death is, rather, a matter of time. On the most basic level, this is because death marks the end of a person’s time on earth. More significantly, the speaker’s journey is temporal because it involves a transition from a time-bound existence to a radically different form of being that exists outside of time. We call this latter form of existence eternity, a word that refers to a condition where, because time is infinite, it no longer has any meaning. Although the tension between time and eternity is at play throughout the poem, it becomes clearest in the final stanza (lines 21–24):

     Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
     Feels shorter than the Day
     I first surmised the Horses' Heads
     Were toward Eternity –

Here, the speaker says she died centuries ago, yet all those hundreds of years feel “shorter than the Day” ever since she began her eternal rest. In this way, the speaker has been liberated from the ordinary time of the world.

Inversion

In this poem, Dickinson depicts death as an inverted version of life. She does so in part by presenting the transitional journey from life to death as a carriage ride, ordinary in almost every way, except for the fact that her escort is not a living gentleman, but Death. Likewise, when the speaker arrives at her grave, she describes it as an inverted house that’s half buried underground. It is in this inverted house that she will live out the eternity of death. To emphasize the inversion of the speaker’s experience, Dickinson employs a unique metrical trick halfway through the poem. At the beginning of the fourth stanza, she 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 stanza (lines 13–16):

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

In addition to the metrical inversion of the first two lines, the last two lines feature an example of syntactic inversion. When describing the garments she’s wearing and the material they’re made of, the speaker reverses the order of information: gossamer gown, tippet of tulle. These inversions underscore the overall presentation of death as life, inverted.

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