. In the third stanza the speaker talks of how she and Death passed the school, the “Fields of Gazing Grain-We passed the Setting Sun.” This stanza is referring to the woman looking back on her own life as she is dying. This would not be possible without an afterlife because if the soul were to simply drift away into nothingness, it wouldn’t be able to reflect it’s lifetime. After this Dickinson presents the idea of the coldness of death in saying “The Dews drew quivering and chill.” This is when we know for sure that the woman is in fact dead. In the fifth stanza, Death and the woman pause before “...a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground- The Roof was scarcely visible- The Cornice in the Ground-.” Even though the poem does not come out and say it, it is likely that this grave is the woman's own. If this is true, then her spirit or soul must be what is looking at the “house.” In most religions, the idea of spirits and souls usually mean that there is an afterlife. It is not until the sixth and final stanza where the audience gets solid evidence that this poem believes in an afterlife. The woman recalls how it has been “...Centuries- and yet feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads were toward Eternity-.” To the soul, it has been at least a hundred years since Death visited her, but to the woman, it has felt like less than a day. Because a human body can’t live for hundreds of years, the soul is who has come to the realization that so much time has passed. The final part with the horses refers to the horse drawn carriage the woman was riding in when she passed away. In those two final lines, the horses seem to be leading her into Eternity, or into an afterlife. Finally, although these two poems deal with the same topic, which is death, they deal with two different views on what happens after this experience. Dickinson like most othe...
