Emily Dickinson The Last Night That She Lived Analysis

In “The Last Night that She Lived,” Emily Dickinson takes an in-depth look into what life and death mean to her, along with delving into what the reader might see in life and death. Throughout the poem Emily Dickinson describes the emotions of the visitors as they wait and watch for a loved one to pass on. In examining death and the human response, Emily Dickinson 's poem is centered on how the people in the poem experience a change in how they view death. In the beginning of the poem the visitors are sitting around waiting for the woman to die, but towards the conclusion of the poem Dickinson makes the people think about what death actually means and represents. Dickinson 's “The Last Night that She Lived” presents the reader with an interesting viewpoint to the poem, where she provides the necessary tools to the reader so that they may navigate their own way through such a tough situation. In this poem Dickinson took the role of an analyst, where “she explored her psyche untiringly, reaching conclusions and expressing those intellectual leaps in her poetry” (McChesney). Dickinson managed to complete this daunting task while also being “firmly anchored in the tangible world” (Bloom). In the poem Dickinson avoids any and all …show more content…
Dickinson’s uses long sentences in the poem that are fragmented by the use of capital letters and hyphens. The disjointed sentences give the poem a “brusque tone” (Piñero and Guijarro). This brusque tone suggested by Piñero and Guijarro is interesting when compared to the idea of death in the poem. Death is normally seen as a peaceful end to life experienced on earth, yet here the death is brusque. The irregularity and brusque tone of the poem present “a bare skeleton of emotion that hasn’t yet been decorated with dramatic imagery” (Peter). An example of what Mr. Peter is saying is shown in the first and second stanzas. Dickinson