Emily Dickinson

American · 1830 – 1886

Photograph by Unknown photographer, cropped. Public domain.

What Serany thinks about Emily Dickinson

Who they are

Emily Dickinson spent nearly all her life in one house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published about ten poems while she was alive. Her sister found nearly eighteen hundred more after she died in 1886.

Why we'd read them at a funeral

She is the only poet here who treats Death as somebody you could meet. In hers he turns up in a carriage, perfectly polite, and drives you past the school and the fields at no particular speed.

Our favourite of theirs

Because I could not stop for Death

Poems by Emily Dickinson

2 in all

Because I could not stop for Death

This poem is for someone unhurried, who took things as they came and was never frightened of what was ahead.

A classicGentle

1890

50 sec

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played, Their lessons scarcely done; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 't is centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.

Read the whole poem →

Hope is the thing with feathers

This poem is for someone who stayed hopeful without ever making a show of it, and kept other people going by it.

A classicComforting

1891

30 sec

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