The Full Text of “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House”
1There's been a Death, in the Opposite House,
2As lately as Today —
3I know it, by the numb look
4Such Houses have — alway —
5The Neighbors rustle in and out —
6The Doctor — drives away —
7A Window opens like a Pod —
8Abrupt — mechanically —
9Somebody flings a Mattress out —
10The Children hurry by —
11They wonder if it died — on that —
12I used to — when a Boy —
13The Minister — goes stiffly in —
14As if the House were His —
15And He owned all the Mourners — now —
16And little Boys — besides.
17And then the Milliner — and the Man
18Of the Appalling Trade —
19To take the measure of the House —
20There'll be that Dark Parade —
21Of Tassels — and of Coaches — soon —
22It's easy as a Sign —
23The Intuition of the News —
24In just a Country Town —
The Full Text of “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House”
1There's been a Death, in the Opposite House,
2As lately as Today —
3I know it, by the numb look
4Such Houses have — alway —
5The Neighbors rustle in and out —
6The Doctor — drives away —
7A Window opens like a Pod —
8Abrupt — mechanically —
9Somebody flings a Mattress out —
10The Children hurry by —
11They wonder if it died — on that —
12I used to — when a Boy —
13The Minister — goes stiffly in —
14As if the House were His —
15And He owned all the Mourners — now —
16And little Boys — besides.
17And then the Milliner — and the Man
18Of the Appalling Trade —
19To take the measure of the House —
20There'll be that Dark Parade —
21Of Tassels — and of Coaches — soon —
22It's easy as a Sign —
23The Intuition of the News —
24In just a Country Town —
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“There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Introduction
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Emily Dickinson's "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" explores the rituals of death in a small town. As the poem's speaker watches all the bustle around a death in the house across the street, his cool, observant tone suggests that he (and the people around him) are actually doing their best to avoid confronting death's inevitability. Like most of Dickinson's work, this poem didn't appear in print until after her death; it was first published in the posthumous collection Poems (1896).
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“There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Summary
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Someone has died in the house across the street this very day. I can tell by the blank, empty look that houses in mourning always have.
The neighbors are bustling in and out the door. The doctor (with nothing else to do) leaves in his carriage. A window flies open as suddenly and automatically as a seed-pod.
Someone throws a mattress out the door. Little kids scurry past, wondering if the dead person died on that very mattress. (I remember wondering the same thing, when I was a boy.)
The priest walks formally into the house as if he owned the place—and owned all its grieving inhabitants, and owned all the little boys in the street, too.
Then, the hat-maker appears; then, the mortician, with his awful job, to take stock of the house he'll stage the funeral in.
Soon, there'll be that grim procession—
We'll see the usual line of carriages all decked out in fancy braid. It's perfectly easy to predict all this, judging by what I can see of the house from here: in a small town, we all guess the news before anyone tells us.
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“There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Themes
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The Inevitability of Death
Death, in this poem, is both ordinary and eerie—and perhaps it’s all the more eerie because it’s so ordinary. As the poem’s speaker watches the people in the house across the road deal with the aftermath of a death, he’s able to predict all the rituals that are about to take place, from the doctor’s departure to the final “Dark Parade” of the funeral procession. The clockwork predictability of the events around this death only underline the idea that death comes to everyone, sooner or later: these rituals are only familiar because death is unavoidable. Death, this poem’s well-worn routines suggest, is an inevitable part of life—and no matter how well one knows this, the thought isn’t altogether comfortable.
The speaker of this poem doesn’t have to be told that “there’s been a Death, in the Opposite House”: he can tell just by observing the usual postmortem routine going on over there. As the “Doctor” leaves to be replaced by the “Minister,” the speaker can predict all the next steps, right up to the formal “Tassels” and “Coaches” of the funeral procession. Especially in this speaker’s small 19th-century “Country Town,” death is an ordinary thing, framed by all sorts of predictable and even humdrum rituals. Everything happening across the road is so familiar to the speaker that he doesn’t even sound particularly moved or upset by what he sees.
But perhaps the speaker’s blasé tone, and even the orderly funeral rituals themselves, are just ways to keep the uncomfortable (and unavoidable) realities of death at bay. As the people in the house throw out an old mattress, the speaker observes children hurrying past and speculates that they “wonder if it died — on that,” just as he used to wonder as a child. The use of the word “it” to describe the corpse (rather than “he” or “she”) suggests just how uncanny and alien a dead body feels—and the speaker clearly shares the children’s unease. Similarly, when the speaker euphemistically describes a mortician as a “Man / Of the Appalling Trade,” his indirect language makes it sound as if a mortician’s job is too horrific to describe plainly. The conventional bustle of funerals can’t quite make death itself seem ordinary.
Death might happen every day, the poem thus suggests, but that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to contemplate—especially because there’s no avoiding death oneself! Even this speaker, who describes the proceedings in such a detached voice, nevertheless pays close attention all day to what’s happening across the road, and sometimes feels “appall[ed]”; he’s at a literal and figurative distance from death for now, but that won’t last forever. The well-worn, conventional rituals that people use to manage their feelings about death, the poem suggests, might only underline death’s uncomfortable inevitability.
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The Pressures of Small-town Life
With its speaker who peeks through his curtains at the “Opposite House” and speculates about the “Death” he’s certain happened there this afternoon, this poem suggests that there’s no such thing as privacy in a place where everybody knows everybody and everything has always been done a certain way. That lack of privacy, alas, doesn’t always mean that neighbors know each other better. Small-town culture, the poem hints, can be simultaneously intrusive and cold.
This poem’s speaker, a nosy neighbor peering out at the “Opposite House,” can tell what’s happened there even though no one has told him: the rituals around a “Death” in this small town spell out the truth as clearly as a painted “Sign.” As the speaker watches, he observes the doctor leaving, the deathbed mattress being thrown out the door, and the “Minister” arriving. All of these signals allow him not just to guess that someone has died across the road, but to predict the future: soon, he says, the “Dark Parade” of the funeral procession will inevitably pass. He can make these educated guesses because he’s lived in this town since he was “a Boy”; the people of small towns, the poem suggests, tend to always behave in the same ways.
What’s more, the speaker’s long and careful observations of what’s going on across the road suggest that it won’t be long before the whole town knows what happened: in a town where everyone can always guess what’s going on (and everyone keeps a watchful eye on their neighbors), there’s no such thing as privacy! The “Intuition of the News” will spread before the body’s even cold.
This small-town claustrophobia, the poem hints, isn’t necessarily accompanied by a warm sense of community, either. This speaker merely observes that “there’s been a Death”—not, say, “I think my neighbor Frank might have died!” His dispassionate observations of the funeral preparations next door suggest that small towns can feel at once nosy, conventional, and rather chilly.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House”
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Lines 1-4
There's been a Death, in the Opposite House,
As lately as Today —
I know it, by the numb look
Such Houses have — alway —As the poem begins, the speaker appears to be rubbernecking. "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House," he says—and the caesura in the middle of the line makes it feel as if he's pausing in the middle of this news to peek through the curtains again. This will be a poem about both the eerieness of death and the difficulty of keeping any news private for long in a small town.
The speaker doesn't have to see anything as telling as, say, a weeping mourner or a coffin delivery to know that a neighbor across the street has died "as lately as Today." Rather, he detects:
[...] the numb look
Such Houses have — alway —The "numb look" on the personified house's face suggests that death has a creepy, spell-like power: the news seems to radiate out through the house itself, changing not just the lives of the mourners, but the world around them.
And the speaker knows that "numb look" well. Houses in which someone has just died "alway" (that is, always) have the exact same look, he suggests. This isn't his first rodeo: he's watched death from a distance before and knows how it plays out.
Readers might already be wondering about the speaker's tone in these first few lines. Considering that the "Opposite House" is right across the street, the speaker doesn't seem worried (or even curious) about who has died: "There's been a Death" feels rather chilly and distant as compared to, say, "Oh my word, I think my neighbor Sue might have died!" But perhaps, as readers will see, that emotional distance comes from unease as much as indifference.
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Lines 5-8
The Neighbors rustle in and out —
The Doctor — drives away —
A Window opens like a Pod —
Abrupt — mechanically — -
Lines 9-12
Somebody flings a Mattress out —
The Children hurry by —
They wonder if it died — on that —
I used to — when a Boy — -
Lines 13-16
The Minister — goes stiffly in —
As if the House were His —
And He owned all the Mourners — now —
And little Boys — besides. -
Lines 17-19
And then the Milliner — and the Man
Of the Appalling Trade —
To take the measure of the House — -
Line 20
There'll be that Dark Parade —
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Lines 21-24
Of Tassels — and of Coaches — soon —
It's easy as a Sign —
The Intuition of the News —
In just a Country Town —
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“There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The poem's vivid similes help to evoke the rituals that automatically kick into gear when someone dies.
While the poem's speaker can tell that "there's been a Death" in the house across the road, he doesn't know it by the sound of weeping or the sight of a corpse. Rather, he observes a series of tell-tale events—ones that are "easy as a Sign" to read and interpret. One of the most striking of these signs is also one of the most ordinary: a window opening. But it's how the window opens that matters:
A Window opens like a Pod —
Abrupt — mechanically —If this window opens "like a Pod," then it's the person opening it who behaves "abrupt[ly]" and "mechanically": the simile here suggests that they're caught up in a process as involuntary as the one that drives seed pods to split open. Readers might reflect that both mourning and death itself are indeed unwilled, unchosen, automatic, and even "mechanical" parts of life.
But there's human power at work here, too. When the "Minister" arrives to discuss the funeral service, he behaves "as if the House were His"—and as if he "owned" the "Mourners" and the "little Boys" rubbernecking in the street outside, too. This simile underscores the idea that death does give the minister a special kind of power: in the world of death and dying, religious authority takes on a new weight! However, the minister's self-conscious, pompous, "stiff" demeanor also reminds readers that he, too, has no real power over death.
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Caesura
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Synecdoche
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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"There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The Opposite House
- Alway
- Pod
- Abrupt
- Flings
- Minister
- Milliner
- The Appalling Trade
- Tassels
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That is, the house across the road from the speaker's.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House”
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Form
The form Dickinson uses in this poem is one of her favorites: the ballad stanza, so called because it turns up in countless old folk songs. Technically speaking, this means that the poem is written in four-line quatrains (four-line stanzas) of common meter, with an ABCB rhyme scheme.
Or at least, most of the poem is written that way. Dickinson does something innovative in lines 17-20, where she breaks out what would usually be the last line of the fifth stanza into its own stand-alone space. The poem thus has seven stanzas instead of the expected six.
And that choice has a good, shivery, atmospheric effect. The particular line Dickinson chooses to set off here describes the "Dark Parade" of a funeral procession. By giving that image a line to itself, she evokes the eerie silence of such a grim "Parade," its stillness broken only by the sound of slow hoofbeats. Perhaps this single lonely line even visually evokes a funeral procession.
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Meter
Like almost all of Dickinson's poetry, "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" is written in common meter. That means that the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm) and iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs).
Here's how that sounds in lines 11-12:
They won- | der if | it died — | on that —
I used | to — when | a Boy —But Dickinson often plays with this meter, varying it for effect. The poem's first line, for example, breaks from the meter before it's even established:
There's been | a Death, | in the Op- | posite House,
The first foot here is ambiguous; readers might hear it as an iamb (as scanned above) or as the opposite foot, a trochee (DUM-da: "There's been"), which would kick the poem off with an emphatic stress. The last two feet, meanwhile, are clearer variations: they're both anapests, feet with a da-da-DUM rhythm. Those extra syllables make this line feel packed with energy, evoking the speaker's ill-concealed anxiety as he watches what's going on across the street.
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Rhyme Scheme
"There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" uses a ballad rhyme scheme. That means its second and fourth lines rhyme, creating the following pattern:
ABCB
But in this poem as in many others, Dickinson makes that neat pattern feel a little uneasy with a wealth of slant rhymes: "away" and "mechanically," for instance, or "by" and "Boy." Those ever-so-slightly off-kilter sounds help, in this case, to evoke the eerie reality of death lurking just beneath all the town's predictable funeral rituals.
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“There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a thoughtful man who lives in a small "Country Town." As he sits watching all the bustle around a "Death" in the neighbors' house across the road, he reflects on the predictable rituals that people go through in these moments of crisis. While he knows his neighborhood well enough to foretell exactly what's going to happen across the road step by step, he doesn't seem very emotionally involved, never naming the dead person nor the mourners. But perhaps that emotional distance is a way for him to protect himself: he's clearly unnerved by the thought of the dead body. His simultaneous curiosity and detachment hint that small-town life can feel both claustrophobic and chilly—and that people often have a hard time confronting the realities of death.
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“There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Setting
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"There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" is set in a small "Country Town": a place where everyone knows everyone's business, and people always seem to act in the same ways. As the speaker watches children hurrying superstitiously past a discarded deathbed mattress, for instance, he remembers acting just that way when he was "a Boy"; little changes around this town. The poem suggests that life in a place like this, with its familiar rituals, can feel both stable and a little restrictive.
This town might have more than a little in common with Dickinson's own hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts—the place where she spent nearly all of her life.
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Literary and Historical Context of “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published almost nothing during her lifetime, and after 1865 she rarely even left her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. But from within this circumscribed world, she explored the heights and depths of human experience through her groundbreaking, world-changing poetry.
No one else sounds quite like Dickinson. Her poems use simple, folky forms—ballad stanzas, for instance—to explore profound philosophical questions, passionate loves, and the mysteries of nature. "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" is a perfect example: its six short stanzas simultaneously capture the eerieness of death and the nosiness of a small town. Death was a frequent theme for Dickinson; she wrote about it from every conceivable perspective, from that of a heartbroken mourner to that of the deceased!
While Dickinson wasn't too publicly involved in the literary world of her time, she was still part of a swell of 19th-century American innovation. Her contemporary Walt Whitman (who became as famous as Dickinson was obscure) was similarly developing an unprecedented and unique poetic voice, and the Transcendentalists (like Emerson and Thoreau) shared her deep belief in the spiritual power of nature. Dickinson herself was inspired by English writers like William Wordsworth and Charlotte Brontë, whose works similarly found paths through the everyday world into the sublime, terrifying, and astonishing.
After Dickinson died, her sister Lavinia discovered a trunk of nearly 1,800 secret poems squirreled away in a bedroom. Published at last, Dickinson's poetry became internationally famous and beloved. Dickinson's work and her life story still influence all kinds of artists.
Historical Context
Dickinson wrote most of her poetry during the American Civil war, which ran from 1861 to 1865. She was firmly on the Union side of that bloody conflict; in one of her letters, she writes with delight about the ignominious defeat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who was reportedly trying to make his escape disguised in a woman's skirt when he was finally captured.
However, Dickinson rarely addressed the political world around her directly in her poetry, preferring either to write about her immediate surroundings or to take a much wider philosophical perspective. But many of Dickinson's poems about death—this one included—might indirectly reflect her feelings about wartime grief. Forced to reckon with many personal losses (like the death of her formidable father), she would also have been surrounded by families grieving their war dead.
This poem might even hint at a new aspect of Civil-War-era death: embalming. Before the Civil War, very few bodies were embalmed; the practice became more popular as soldiers' bodies needed to be shipped from battlefields back to their hometowns. But many people were uneasy with embalming, seeing it as unnatural. Perhaps that's what makes the mortician's "Trade" so "Appalling."
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More “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” Resources
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External Resources
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A Manuscript of the Poem — See an image of the poem in Emily Dickinson's own handwriting.
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The Dickinson Museum — Visit the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum to learn more about her life and work.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Dickinson's Legacy — Listen to three contemporary writers discussing Dickinson's influence on their work.
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A Portrait of Dickinson — See a recently rediscovered photo of Dickinson—one of only two we know of!—and learn more about her later life after she withdrew from society.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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