There's been a Death, in the Opposite House The Home Quotes

The minister is just one of the many people who go in and out of this house on this death day. Here Dickinson puns on the word "stiff" to play with the notion of the corpse. The minister enters like a corpse, "As if the House were His." And while Dickinson goes on to explain how bossy he gets, acting like he owns everybody, where does a stiff go? There's also a suggestion that the house here is being compared to a coffin. That's not Dickinson being original. Lots of other poets have made that association, think of William Cullen Bryant's "narrow house" in "Thanatopsis."

If the house is a container for a life, the final house is the coffin. Here the undertaker's undertaking is to take the measure of the corpse and the doorways, to make sure the final passage is possible.