Emily Dickinson

Farewell

FAREWELL.

Carriage preparation

"Tie the strings" refers to securing baggage on a carriage—she's treating death as travel prep. The casual tone ("That will do!") makes dying sound like catching a stagecoach.

TIE the strings to my life, my Lord,
Then I am ready to go!
Just a look at the horses—
Rapid! That will do!
Put me in on the firmest side,
So I shall never fall;
For we must ride to the Judgment,
And it's partly down hill.

Downhill to judgment

The ride to Judgment Day is "partly down hill"—easier than expected. Dickinson undercuts Christian terror with practical travel logistics.

But never I mind the bridges,
And never I mind the sea;

Held fast

"Everlasting race" could mean eternal competition or eternal journey. The ambiguity matters—is this about winning or just moving forever?

Held fast in everlasting race
By my own choice and thee.
Good-by to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;

Kiss the hills

She asks someone else to kiss the hills goodbye for her—the only moment of actual grief in this brisk departure.

Now I am ready to go!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Death as Stagecoach Ride

Dickinson treats death like booking passage on the Amherst-to-Boston stage. "Tie the strings to my life" uses the exact language of securing luggage to a carriage roof. "Put me in on the firmest side" means choosing the safest seat (away from the door that might fly open). "Just a look at the horses— / Rapid!" sounds like a traveler approving the team before departure.

This isn't metaphor for metaphor's sake. In 1850s New England, the stagecoach was how you left town—and how corpses were transported to family burial plots. Dickinson collapses the distance between ordinary travel and final journey by using identical vocabulary for both.

The poem's tone is aggressively casual. "That will do!" treats eternity like acceptable horseflesh. "Never I mind the bridges" dismisses obstacles with the grammar of folk speech ("never I mind" instead of "I never mind"). She's performing confidence, maybe to convince herself, maybe to mock the solemnity everyone else brings to deathbed scenes.

What Gets Mourned

For fifteen lines, Dickinson is all business—checking the carriage, planning the route, waving goodbye. Then: "And kiss the hills for me, just once." The only request. The only thing she can't do herself.

She doesn't ask anyone to kiss her family, her house, her books. Just "the hills"—the landscape visible from her bedroom window in Amherst. The request goes to an unnamed "you" (the reader? a companion? God?), someone who will remain in the physical world she's leaving.

"Good-by to the life I used to live" uses past tense—she's already gone, already speaking from beyond the boundary. The poem ends where it began: "Now I am ready to go!" But that exclamation point has changed. After the hills, it reads less like eagerness and more like resolution. She's ready because she's said the one goodbye that mattered.