Peace is supposed to be a comfort, so it comes as a small shock to see it described as something that "infests." The word belongs to rats, lice and damp walls, and Dickinson attaches it to a "chilly Peace" settling over the grass. From the first line, the stillness is not restful in a greeting-card way. It spreads, it is cold, and it cannot be got rid of. The poem never names its setting, but the clues accumulate (grass, shadows, people "delivered here"), and the most natural reading, an inference since the poem leaves it unsaid, is a graveyard where every human being eventually arrives. Its central idea is that death brings an end to all activity and all distinction.
The first stanza sets the scene by showing what has stopped. The Sun "respectful lies," low and hushed, like a mourner lowering his head. The verb is clever, because lying down is also what the buried do. The sun is normally the engine of growth and the day's work, and here it has been reduced to good manners. Then come the shadows, which "scrutinize" the ground for any "Trance of industry" and find none. Calling busyness a "trance" is a sly insult to the living, since ordinary bustle looks like sleepwalking beside the real stillness of this place. "Scrutinize" is also a hard, official word, and it makes the shadows seem like inspectors checking the ground for signs of work.
The second stanza turns from the place to the people, and its grammar is knotty. "Whose Allies" has no obvious antecedent, so the reader must supply the dead, or perhaps the whole company of the buried. "Allies" suggests people bound together in a cause, and what they no longer do is "go astray / For service or for Glee." Duty and pleasure are the two great motives that send people out into the world, and both are now over. "Astray" carries a moral shade as well as a physical one, so these sleepers will not wander or stray into temptation again. The poem's final image then widens: "all mankind deliver here / From whatsoever sea." "Deliver" is a harbor word, as if humanity were cargo brought into port, but it also whispers of deliverance. Life becomes a sea, and people set out from different waters toward one shore. The poem ends on a dash rather than a full stop, so the sea is left open behind us.
The form is quietly traditional. Lines alternate between eight and six syllables, in the pattern of the hymn stanza that Dickinson used so often, and the second and fourth lines rhyme: "lies" with "scrutinize," "Glee" with "sea." Hymns are built to console a congregation, so the choice is faintly ironic. The tidy, orderly stanzas match the orderly rest they describe, yet what they deliver is chill rather than comfort. Her habits of punctuation and capitalization do further work. The dashes and the capitals on Peace, Grass, Trance, Allies and Glee turn common words into near-characters, as in a small allegory in which abstractions walk through the grass.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and most of her poems were not published in her lifetime. Nothing in the poem needs a biographical key. Its significance lies in how it handles a subject that usually produces either sentimental comfort or gothic terror. Dickinson offers neither. There is no heaven here, no worms and no weeping, only a calm, almost bureaucratic tone that makes the calm more unsettling. "Infests" lets her say two things at once, that this peace is real and that it is invasive. The last lines are also democratic. "All mankind" arrives "from whatsoever sea," whatever its origin or ambition. In eight short lines, the poem gives death's equality an eerie quiet that stays with the reader.