Due to an odd connection, I’ve been writing about Dickinson’s poems focused on death and young women. It started when I looked into how often Dickinson used the words “Olympic” and “athlete” (never) and “sport,” used once in “She lay as if at play.”
 | I wrote about that poem two days ago, plus I listed a number of similar poems with a similar theme (HERE). One I forgot to mention was “The last night that she lived.” I know I’ve posted the poem before, and I remember that I pointed out that final stanza – where the mourners “placed the Hair / And drew the Head erect” – for it reminded me of the Victorian era’s custom of post-mortem photography, just one of their “memento mori” funerary practices, info HERE. This site -- HERE -- has a nice analysis of the poem. If you scroll down the page, they even have a stanza-by-stanza analysis – EXCEPT – I noticed with the final stanza, they don’t even mention the implications of those final two lines, “And then an awful leisure was / Belief to regulate.” The theme and images of the poem – and even those final lines – call to mind Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” Of course, in that poem, the speaker is the person dying; in this poem the speaker is a mourner witnessing another’s death – one whose breath gathered firm “For that last Onset – when the King / Be witnessed in the room.”  |
Of course, in the one poem, there interposed a fly. In this poem, there is just an “awful leisure” when one must coem to terms with one’s own beliefs.
There are a number of images I love in this poem, including (and certainly not limited to) “It was a narrow time” (I love the diverse and distinct ways Dickinson refers to the passage of time in her poems), “Too jostled were Our Souls to speak” and the image of the dying girl “lightly as a Reed” bending to the water.
One other odd bit of trivia -- I noticed that the poem in Johnson's edition of "complete poems" has the same number as the poem in Franklin's edition of "complete poems" -- 1100.
That doesn't happen very often! ;-)
There are a number of images I love in this poem, including (and certainly not limited to) “It was a narrow time” (I love the diverse and distinct ways Dickinson refers to the passage of time in her poems), “Too jostled were Our Souls to speak” and the image of the dying girl “lightly as a Reed” bending to the water.
One other odd bit of trivia -- I noticed that the poem in Johnson's edition of "complete poems" has the same number as the poem in Franklin's edition of "complete poems" -- 1100.
That doesn't happen very often! ;-)
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