The Last Night That She Lived, By Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived the entirety of her life. It was here where she would oftentimes correspond with a small group of select friends, for whom she deeply cared about. Entering the late 1800s, she wrote most of the poems for which she is known today. A few years afterwards, various members of her family and several friends passed away, leaving her in a questionable emotional state and in turn making future readers wonder if the deaths of those close to her also affected her poetic inspirations. In her poem “The Last Night that She Lived,” Emily Dickinson features a female speaker who presents an image of a group of people waiting and pacing around a house as a woman lies on her deathbed-- image

Every instance of the word “She” (1) or “Her” (10) is capitalized, and each time these words are featured in the poem they refer to the dying woman. While they could also serve as a substitute for the woman’s name, capitalizing “She” and “Her” allows said pronouns to stand out from the uniform four-line format of Dickinson’s writing. The same thing occurs with the capitalization of the words “We” (5) and “Us” (3), which are used to address the people waiting on the woman’s death. Writing all of these pronouns with capitalized first letters forms a link between the dying woman and the people surrounding her; both parties are equally relevant to the process of death, and the narrator welcomes her role. Another example is the capitalization of the words “Blame” (12) and “Jealousy” (15). Regardless of spacing, lines 12 to 14 can be compiled into a single phrase that reads: “a Blame/ That Others [can] exist/While She must finish” (12-14). The dying woman acknowledges her imminent passing, yet she does not agree with the idea of having people around her simply pacing the rooms and expecting her to die soon. Because this is all said from the point of view of the narrator, it can be inferred that the narrator herself is uncomfortable seeing the woman die and feels guilty for witnessing said death as she is well and living, while also

The dash at the end of the sentence “A Jealousy for Her [arises]/So nearly infinite—“ (15-16) serves the purpose of stressing the infinity of the “Jealousy” or, if read in conjecture with the next phrases as: “So nearly infinite—We [wait] while she [passes]--/It was a narrow time--” (16-18), the same dash makes clear how waiting for the woman to die seems to take a longer time than what it actually takes. Either way, the dash after “infinite” denotes a passage of time whose length is skewed due to the circumstances of the forlorn gathering. Once more, the narrator demonstrates that she does not necessarily want to see the woman pass away, but she has no other choice and would rather have the ordeal end as soon as possible (even when it feels as if it is taking much