[In the following essay, Stambovsky offers a 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 Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame
That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite—
We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.
She mentioned, and forgot—
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce—
Consented, and was dead—
And We—We placed the Hair—
And drew the Head erect—
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—(1)

In the opening stanza, the persona succinctly delineates on an objective plane of discourse the physical and psychological occasion of the poem: night, dying, the witnesses' altered sense of awareness. The capitalization of “Common Night,” by stressing the virtually insignificant, matter-of-fact aspect of this occurrence in the total scheme of things, communicates the irony of an indifferent Nature (what the poet elsewhere calls the Deity's “Perturbless Plan”).

An abrupt transition, from the level of objective fact to that of personal experience, takes place in the third line of the opening stanza. The reader is thus suddenly made an intimate to the drama of the situation. The Dying—to Us, makes everything different.²

The focus in the second quatrain is on specifics of awareness. When consciousness is overcharged with tension, the petty, the diminutive, the banal stand out in sharp relief, “Italicized—as 'twere.”³ Under such circumstances, the simplest objects or acts often seem oddly imbued with profound meaning

In the third stanza, the focus turns from the character of awareness to the witnesses' movement, “out and in / Between Her final Room.” The depiction of moving between the room where the woman lies dying and other rooms (where those who are not dying abide) underscores the poignant contrast between the abjectness of impending stasis and a guilty enjoyment of continuing vitality. The pronoun, “Those,” in the third line, while understood to include “We,” suggests nevertheless a curious isolation of “We” from “Those to be alive / Tomorrow”: the witnessing consciousness cannot identify completely with “Those to be alive / Tomorrow.”

The shift in the third stanza from the experience of awareness to the experience of movement, a shift from the descriptively suggestive to the dramatically suggestive, is part of a gradual approach of the witness, through four stanzas, to the bedside of the dying woman.

Emily Dickinson's use of capitalization for emphasis might lead one to expect the adjective, “final,” in the second line of this quatrain, to be capitalized. After all, the awareness of death's finality is a leitmotif or at least a pervasive element of the emotional ambient of the poem. The verse is not, however, about the finality of death, nor about the experience of dying.⁴ Keeping this in mind helps make clear how the capitalization in the second line functions. “The Last Night that She Lived” is a study of the psychology of witnessing death; and while the finality of the situation colors the witnesses' consciousness, it does not emerge as a theme of awareness until the middle of the fourth stanza.

The capitalization of “Her” and “Room” bespeaks a tension informing the cognizance of the distinction between possessing and being possessed: there will be a point at which the room will no longer be the dying woman's. While she lives, she still possesses the room; but as her final, tomb-like chamber, the room will soon possess her.

Closing the third stanza with “Blame,” the poet effects a subtle transition to the abstract fourth stanza. While the persona elucidates the meaning of this Blame in the fourth stanza, the conditions that generate the experience of it are recounted in the third.

The middle section is a climactic distillation of the poem's central theme: the nature of the consciousness of witnessing a death. The focus of awareness moves totally beyond the world of concrete experience in this quatrain, to the plane of psychological reality, the realm of spirit. Here, the poet succinctly renders the knowing that underlies survivor's guilt: ‘That others could exist / While she must finish quite.” “Finish quite” conveys an almost overwhelming sense of finality; and it stands as a powerfully evocative point of emphasis in a psychological recapitulation of the scene depicted in the second and third lines of the preceding stanza.

If the last line of third stanza is regarded in terms of its transitional function, the middle two lines of that quatrain and the first two of the fourth together reveal an instance of chiastically structured thematic development:

Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
That Others could exist
While She must finish quite

The relationship between the couplets sets in relief the thematic development occurring through the third and fourth stanzas. In the third, the persona recounts physical facts that fairly bristle with psychological implications. In the fourth stanza, she articulates existential correlates of those implications. “Finish quite” thus accrues thematic meaning and impact as the ultimate terms in an affective coalescence of implications of a “final Room.”

A second reason “finish quite” has such impact is related to what might be termed an articulated rhyme. The short i in “exist” is echoed in “finish,” while the t-sound resonates in “quite.” The fundamental life/death polarity manifest in juxtaposing “exist” and “finish quite” is emblematic of the profound psychic dilemma the experience of a death creates in the witnessing consciousness.

A richly ambiguous reference occurs at the end of the fourth stanza: “nearly infinite” could be taken to modify either “Jealousy” or “Her.” Nearly infinite jealousy, jealousy virtually without bounds, of those whom we have survived (and henceforth must do without) is a potent, if often repressed, psychological fact. Considered as an evil sentiment, jealousy elicits guilt. This is an inversion (and may be regarded as a psychological limitation that Emily Dickinson transcended) of the Christian doctrine that guilt is the original cause of death, and not vice versa. Read in this way, “The Last Night that She Lived” reaches a nihilistic spiritual nadir in its climactic stanza by tacitly negating a fundamental premise of religious belief and along with it the hope of finding comfort or relief in traditional religious faith.

In the alternative reading of the second couplet of the fourth stanza, “infinite” modifies “Her.” At death the history of a life is complete, perpetually unalterable, infinitely what it is. The deceased individual's being has become an objective, internally fixed historical fact. “Infinite” here connotes the sense of a state that, in its absolute determination, transcends space and time. This is suggestive of the Platonic conception of the “most real,” and casts life and phenomenological reality in a haunting ontological twilight.⁵ As opposed to a mood of despair, this second reading of the last two lines of the poem's central quatrain generates a sense of peace that borders on awe.

In the fifth quatrain, the focus shifts back to the social context of the situation, until, through a finely wrought transition, it turns directly upon the dying. A Dickinsonian synthesis of temporal and spatial modalities gets right to the heart of the experience: “It was a narrow time” illumes the ineffably intimate plane of awareness on which the drama of the poem operates, and operates such as to afford the reader/participator a positive experiential index of the existential values informing the psychology of the witnessing consciousness.

A movement to the completely metaphoric representation of experience occurs in the penultimate stanza. That the persona recounts the final moments of dying entirely in figurative language, and that the poet sets this key scene in the sixth quatrain (rather than in the fourth or the last) substantiates on structural grounds the assertion that Emily Dickinson's purpose in “The Last Night that She Lived” is the exploration of the witnessing consciousness.⁶

The use of metaphor in the sixth stanza is perhaps among the most precise and poignant in the language. The suggestion of mentioning and then forgetting what it was that one meant to say, besides the explicit image and even visceral response it elicits, invokes the archetypal association of death with forgetting. The metaphor of a bent reed worried by a passing breeze that ultimately frees its top end from the surface of the water dramatizes the conception of death as release, that is, as a removal of strain or tension; an inevitable liberation involving, paradoxically enough, “Consent” (of the Pascalian “thinking reed”?). This particular understanding of dying is a vital condition of the persona's ability to assimilate an otherwise devastating experience. Death, for the living, is often the point of release for pent up grief; it is the point at which healing, the return to some sort of normalcy, may begin.

The closing stanza marks a return to literal discourse. The use of “the” in place of the possessive pronoun “her,” attests electrifyingly to the stark reality of the change that has taken place. Dying transmutes subjectivity to objectivity. “Hair” and “Head,” features preceded by the definite article, have lost their association with an organic unity (a living body). The hair and the head no longer belong to anyone: they are merely discrete appurtenances of an inert body.

In the two closing lines of the poem, the focus moves from the concrete (where the configuration of awareness is objectified in characterizations of physical activity and perception outward) to an abstract, self-reflective level. This shift projects the reader to the center of the persona's psyche, and to the closure, or better, the residuum of a profoundly moving experience.

The multi-faceted awfulness of the “leisure” the witnessing consciousness faced after the ordeal is a composite of several acceptations of “awful”: awe inspiring, appalling, reverential. And the regulation of belief, the coming to terms with the reality of the situation, is managed only by reaching an acceptance of the experience through each of the modalities of awfulness (each of which structures awareness, and thereby conditions the contemplation of experience, in a unique way). This is the “leisure” afforded the witnessing consciousness: that which, in the derivative sense of the word, is permitted it, following its intimate confrontation with death.

Notes

1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), pp. 496-7.

2. This switching of perspective is a characteristic of other Emily Dickinson poems, such as the famous “Because I could Not Stop for Death,” where the transition is based on the motif of temporality.

3. See Karl Shapiro's “Auto Wreck” for an example of a vivid contemporary poetic rendering of this.

4. For contrast, see “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.”

5. Wallace Stevens brilliantly depicts this in the final stanza of “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” his beautiful elegy on the death of Santayana:

   Total grandeur of a total edifice / … He stops upon this
   threshold, / As if the design of all his words takes form / And frame from
   thinking and is realized.

6. The witnessing consciousness in the poem is certainly the poet's own and her use of the first person plural throughout, aside from subtly drawing the reader into the acutely vivid world of her experience, can be seen as an ego ploy, a defense. The use of the plural diffuses a sense of self-involvement so intense it threatens to stifle efforts to master, to assimilate experience.