The poem’s setting is a carriage ride through a nondescript town, likely in the New England countryside of the nineteenth century. Dickinson spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the “School” (9) and “Fields of Gazing Grain” (11) could easily have been drawn from her nearby surroundings. But aside from a few period details in the speaker’s clothing and the fact that she is riding in a horse-drawn carriage, the scenery is universal and timeless. Almost any reader can picture themself making the same journey and so imagine, as Dickinson did, what the passage to the afterlife might be like. According to the poem, this passage is both ordinary and extraordinary.

If the geographic setting represents the ordinariness of the experience of dying, the temporal setting unsettles the sense of familiarity imparted by the scenery. The carriage ride presumably lasts from the afternoon, when children are...