Emily Dickinson Poem Analysis

The Last Night that She Lived

After evaluating my perception of The Last Night that She Lived, by Emily Dickinson. The message in this poem is we take life for granted and we don't appreciate it until we are threatened with losing it. Emily used what seems to me as free verse with no apparent rhyme but alliteration at times. This is a Narrative poem that tells a story about a death of a young woman.

In the first verse Dickinson was saying when she wrote,

"The last Night that She lived

It was a common night

Except to the Dying--This to Us

Made Nature different"

In that verse the poet was describing that to the ordinary person it was a regular night not out of the ordinary. Since she was dying the world seemed different to her. She had different views on her life and all of the sudden the smallest things she used to take for granted meant so much to her. This verse is an aphorism on how you don't know what you truly have until it's gone.

Once you're faced with losing your life even the smallest things become meaningful. All of the sudden when dying the meaning to life becomes important. As the woman was grasping her last hours on earth and seizing each moment other people were going on living, as if the day meant nothing because they had so much more of life to live. It was just a regular ordinary day to them, but to her it was everything. When Dickinson uses the phrase, "As We went out and in Between Her final Room And Room Where those alive," She is saying in other words as the woman lived her final hours, everyone else was still alive.

Realizing that her life was slipping away, the woman became jealous of the people who were alive and well. They were taking their lives for granted, as she too, did at one time. So far this poem seems to be telling a story about a woman's death, before and after. This poem was written in Quatrains. Every stanza in the poetry consists of four lines.

Her death was a very long process. When the woman's loved ones found that out they became saddened. "Too jostled were our souls to speak" the time to talk to her passed so quickly because they were grieving over her condition.