Three Words

The poem 479/712 by Emily Dickenson is widely popular among critics today because of its form, imagery and theme. Three words that seem particularly significant to this poem are death, passed and eternity.

Death is a very significant word within this poem despite the fact that it appears only once. Death is the overarching theme of this poem and is personified as a gentleman with superb manners and character. The speaker relates that on their busy and never-resting journey of life, death courteously stopped by to whisk her away on a delightful and leisurely ride through time and space.

Passed is the second word that seems immensely important to this poem, not only because it appears four times in the short work, but also because it deals with time, a theme that runs throughout the whole poem. In the first line the speaker states that in life she is too busy to even stop for death. Time continues regardless of an individual’s needs or condition. However, even after death time continues to carry on. The travelling pair passes through the world of the living no longer aware of the time it takes to traverse distances. In death, time passes by as a scene of a movie. A few moments can represent years, lifetimes, even centuries.

The word eternity is not mentioned until the very end of the poem. The traveling duo is still passing through time but the passenger sees things differently at this point. Centuries have passed and yet it seemed that it had been only a single day since she began this journey with death. She now realizes that there is not a destination for which they are heading. The “horses’ heads / Were toward Eternity” and that was the true destination. She had already arrived when she stepped into the carriage and she would continue on the everlasting tranquil voyage toward it for as long as her soul will last.

Twain's Many Challenges to his Readers

After having read and analyzed several of Twain’s works, I have come to the conclusion that he enjoyed challenging the common and popular thoughts of people around him. Twain combines humor, sarcasm and, often, realism, to make points about the views and beliefs of his time. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we see Twain challenging several things, among them the common understanding of right and wrong. In Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences, Twain challenges the generally accepted view that Cooper’s works are spectacular pieces of literary art. In A True Story, the views of the old south are challenged through the story of a former slave and the hardships that she endured. We see similar challenges in Letters From the Earth, where Twain confronts the common beliefs of Christians by suggesting that the Christian God is Deistic as well as suggesting the possibility of Theistic Evolution, both religious concepts that were not popularly considered during his time.

By proposing the possibility of God having chosen to create the universe with “Atomatic Law,” Twain is challenging one of the most important aspect of the Christian religion, prayer. Christians believe in prayer having the power to move the hand of God. The belief is that lives can be changed by prayer and God’s mind can be changed. If God is a Deistic god, then prayer would be not only powerless, but a complete waste of time. There would be no point in praying to a God that cannot, or will not, hear you.

Twain also challenges the common Christian understanding of creation by suggesting that theistic evolution is the way that the heavens, earth and all the creatures on it where created. This concept tries to sync scientific views of evolution with the Christian belief in a creator by suggesting that the 6 days in which God created everything was actually “equivalent to a hundred million years, earthly time.” This time lapse would allow for evolution to take place at the guidance of God. This was not a popular view among Christians during this time and would certainly have stirred the pot if published at the time when Twain wrote it instead of 60 years later.

There are many other theological challenges to be analyzed within Letters From the Earth including the reasons behind God’s choice to create man, the creation of both good and evil character by God, the human ideas and views of heaven and hell, the many contradictions that present themselves in the bible and between the believers and their actions, the list goes on. It is a fabulous work that pushes people out of their comfort zones and challenges them to question the sanity of their own beliefs.