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Carriage

The carriage that conveys the speaker on her journey to another realm of existence functions in the poem as a multilayered symbol. Most obviously, the carriage symbolizes the transportive quality of death. That is, death involves a departure from life that transports us away from everything familiar. As the conveyance that takes the speaker on her one-way passage, the carriage symbolizes the way death removes the deceased from the life they’ve known. Perhaps less obviously, the carriage also symbolizes the speaker’s physical body. Dickinson suggests this possibility in part through word choice. In addition to being a horse-drawn wagon, the word carriage can also be used to describe a person’s physical bearing or comportment. Furthermore, given that the speaker is addressing us from beyond the grave, it’s clear that her consciousness remains intact, even as she’s left her physical form behind. Dickinson implies that the speaker will depart from her body when, after arriving at the strangely buried house, she at last steps out of the “carriage” and enters her tomb. This is the moment when she will shuffle off her mortal coil.

House

In the fifth stanza (lines 17–20), the speaker and Death arrive at a house that appears to have been buried beneath a great mound of soil:

     We paused before a House that seemed
     A Swelling of the Ground –
     The Roof was scarcely visible –
     The Cornice – in the Ground –

This strange, unsettling “House” represents the speaker’s tomb, where she will have her final resting place. The fact that her tomb appears in the form of a house symbolizes the way that death is an inverted version of life. Just as she lived in a house in life, she’ll live in a house in death. Only, instead of being above ground, her death-house will be buried. It’s appropriate that the speaker’s death-house should be underground, since the speaker’s own body will presumably be buried upon her passing. It’s also appropriate that, though recognizable as a house, the elements that make a house a home are “scarcely visible.” The speaker can barely make out the roof, much less the decorative cornice that adorns the roofline. There’s no telling, then, what the inside of this house might be like. Thus, while the house clearly symbolizes the speaker’s final dwelling place, it’s equally clear that her tomb will not be a place of homey comfort.

Horses’ heads

In the poem’s final stanza (lines 21–24), the speaker closes by describing how centuries have passed since her death:

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

The “Horses’ Heads” mentioned here refer to the horses that drew Death’s carriage. On the most basic level, the speaker is saying that the horses drawing the carriage were heading in the direction of “Eternity.” That is, they were taking her to her final dwelling place, which exists outside the bounds of ordinary time-bound experience. It’s important to note that the horses’ heads were facing “toward Eternity,” suggesting that they have not arrived there. In this way, the horses’ heads symbolize how the transition from life (and time) to death (and eternity) occurs beyond something like a distant horizon. This horizon constantly withdraws as you approach it, making the question of how to get beyond it a matter of profound mystery. Additionally, Dickinson’s reference to the horses may subtly allude to the four horsemen who appear in the biblical Book of Revelation. As personifications of Death, War, Famine, and Conquest, these horsemen signal the coming of the Rapture and the transition of all worthy souls into Eternity.

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