The Last Night That She Lived Essay

Emily Dickinson in her poem uses a variety of strategies in order to instill attitude and portray her feelings. In doing so, Dickinson is able to create an atmosphere that surrounds the audience and conveys her mood towards the subject at hand, death. With interpretation and analyzation of the event, the audience finds that Dickinson has an interesting perception of the matter at hand. At first sight, one may believe that the speaker feels great sorrow for the death of the woman discussed during the poem, however after further analyzation this hypothesis becomes doubtful. Dickinson opens the poem with “The last Night that She lived”, establishing early on the death of a character whose name is not even mentioned. Dickinson continues to use pronouns such as “her” and “she” to characterize the character. Furthermore, Dickinson evens refers to this person as an object showing that this person does not hold much value in her life. This comes in the last stanza, line 25 and 26 when Dickinson writes “And We …show more content…
“We waited while she passed” and “As We went out and in between her final room” are just some of the moments where Dickinson is able to use “we” in order to camouflage herself amongst the crowd. This further demonstrates that the speaker is not comfortable enough to speak on the topic with a personal standpoint. Not only does the speaker use the pronoun we, she also uses “our” and “us.” In stanza five she states “We waited while she passed- it was a narrow time- Too jostled were Our Souls to speak.” Due to the fact that the speaker is once again speaking for the group and calls the time in which they wait a “narrow time” it goes to show that the time seemed to be stretched out for the handful within the room with the dying