Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Phillip Stambovsky (essay date 1986)

Phillip Stambovsky (essay date 1986)

”Emily Dickinson's ‘The Last Night that She Lived’: Explorations of a Witnessing Spirit,” Concerning Poetry, Vol. 19, 1986, pp. 87-93.

[In the following excerpt, Stambovsky offers a very detailed reading of “The Last Night that She Lived,” asserting that Dickinson accepts the reality of death through her “intimate confrontation” with it in the poem.]

Emily Dickinson's “The Last Night that She Lived” is a psychologically acute rendering of an unhinging spiritual experience. Far from being an immersion in morbid pathos, however, the poem is a brilliantly searching study of the consciousness of witnessing a death.

The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ’twere.
As We went out and in
Between Her final...

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