What’s Up With the Title?

"Because I could not stop for Death" is actually not the title of this poem. Dickinson didn't title any of her poems, because she never meant to publish them. In collections, sometimes this poem is given a number, either 479 or (712). These numbers were assigned to the poems after Dickinson's death and indicate the order in which Thomas Johnson (1955 edition) and R.W. Franklin (1998 edition) think they were written. Nowadays, the Franklin number, which is not in parenthesis and appears first, is usually the more trusted.