Emily Dickinson wrote this around 1863 and, like almost everything she wrote, never published it. It appeared in Poems in 1890, four years after her death, in the first selection her editors drew from the eighteen hundred poems she left behind — the same editors, and the same undertaking, as "Hope" is the thing with feathers. They gave it the title The Chariot, and this page keeps their text, because it is the one in the public domain.
The poem is a carriage ride. Death calls, politely, for a woman too busy to have stopped for him, and she gets in; Immortality rides along as a third passenger. They drive slowly, in no hurry, past a school, past fields of grain, past the setting sun — a whole life going by the window at a walking pace, and already in the past tense.
The house they pause at is a grave — "a swelling of the ground", its roof barely showing — and the poem neither flinches nor explains. It ends centuries later, the speaker still in the carriage, still moving, having realised only in hindsight where the horses were always headed. Death is never frightening here; he is courteous, and that is the more unsettling thing.