So many feelings and voices, loves found and lost and found again. Mystery, always mystery.
Dying and death may be regarded as separable, one succeeding the other, the first part of living, the second, mystery. They are also both part of living, since we are living and dying, experiencing births and deaths and rebirths, small and large, all the time, albeit sometimes more than others. As Stanley Kunitz knew,
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
Emily Dickinson is one of the great students of dying and death in their weave with life. She writes of death as kind host and companion. I think of her invocation of eternity and immortality as expressions of her companionship with the deepest mystery of every day.
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 strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –
Note: A tippet is a woman's shawl or hood worn around neck and shoulders.
In a letter to Abiah Root, Dickinson asked, "Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you...I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a relief to so endless a state of existense."
Another of her best known poems:
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –