eels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses Heads / Were toward Eternity –“ (21-24). Dickinson contends here that there is nothing to death, and that a moment of life is more easily recalled than centuries of lifelessness. Staunch boredom and nothingness is all that may exist for the speaker, because the hundreds of years spent in the ground have gone by like the blink of an eye, because, Dickinson would state, there is nothing there, nothing but a sterile and unfortunate state of existence where one is aware of their death, but can do nothing of it, but ponder and recall. Again, images of death are laid forth by the existence of horses’ heads (often a symbol of death and the underworld), as well as the previously sighted use of “eternity”. The speaker now has exactly that long to consider the occurrences of the day that Death kindly stopped. ...
