Emily Dickinson

Twas warm at first like us,

The pronoun 'It'

Dickinson never says 'corpse' or 'body'—just 'It.' This clinical distance mirrors how death turns a person into an object.

'TWAS warm at first like us,
Until there crept thereon
A chill, like frost upon a glass
Till all the scene be gone.
The forehead copied stone,
The fingers grew too cold
To ache, and like a skater's brook

Skater's brook

A frozen pond—the surface glazes over but you can still see through. Eyes open but unseeing, like ice over water.

The busy eyes congealed.
It straightened—that was all.

Crowded cold to cold

Rigor mortis. The body contracts, limbs drawing inward as muscles stiffen. 'Crowded' makes it sound like the cold is packing itself tighter.

It crowded cold to cold—
It multiplied indifference
As Pride were all it could.

Pride metaphor

The corpse's stiffness looks like haughtiness—chin up, rigid posture. Death mimics aristocratic disdain.

And even when with cords

Lowered like freight

Burial. 'Freight' strips away funeral dignity—the body is cargo being loaded into the ground.

'Twas lowered like a freight,
It made no signal, nor demurred,
But dropped like adamant.

Adamant

Both 'unyielding' and an archaic word for diamond or lodestone. The body falls with mineral finality—no resistance, no life.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Dickinson's Clinical Autopsy

This is Dickinson watching a corpse from warmth to burial, cataloging each stage with scientific precision. The poem tracks cooling (stanza 1), stiffening (stanza 2), rigor mortis (stanza 3), and burial (stanza 4). Each stanza is a timestamp in decomposition.

The opening "like us" is the poem's only gesture toward the living. After that, the pronoun 'It' does brutal work—Dickinson refuses to say 'he' or 'she,' refuses even to say 'body.' The person becomes a thing before our eyes. This grammatical choice enacts the poem's subject: death as depersonalization.

"The forehead copied stone" is the key image. Not 'became stone' or 'turned to stone'—copied. The body is plagiarizing death, imitating mineral stillness. Dickinson sees death as mimicry: the corpse pretending to be a rock, the stiffness pretending to be pride. Nothing is authentic anymore.

The frost on glass simile works because glass is already hard and cold—frost just makes the coldness visible. Similarly, death doesn't change what we are (material, temporary) but reveals it. The warmth was the illusion; the cold is the truth underneath.

Why the Repetition?

The poem appears twice in your text, but Dickinson didn't write it that way—this is an editorial duplication. The actual poem is 16 lines, four quatrains, one brutal descent from warmth to ground.

Dickinson's progression is relentless: sight goes ("eyes congealed"), touch goes ("too cold to ache"), and finally all response goes ("made no signal, nor demurred"). The senses shut down in order. By stanza 4, the body can't even react to its own burial.

"Multiplied indifference" is the mathematical heart of the poem. Death compounds. It's not one loss but geometric—each cold moment makes the next colder, each stiffness creates more stiffness. The body becomes exponentially less human.

The final image—"dropped like adamant"—uses a word meaning both 'unyielding' and 'diamond/lodestone.' The body falls with mineral certainty, no different from a stone dropped down a well. That's the poem's final cruelty: not that we die, but that in death we become as indifferent as rocks, as unprotesting as freight.