What Is Death

Nicholas Schrapps

Professor Donald Carey

American Literature 2326

15 September 2014

What is Death?

Emily Dickinson has written many poems that have opened doors to her personal thoughts on “death”, and the afterlife that is perceived to follow. Death is the only true eminent feature of life, which makes it a topic that is thought upon quite different amongst literary authors and the scholars of these writings. Poems such as “The Last Night that She Lived”, “My life closed twice before it’s close”, and “A Death Blow is a Life Blow to Some” are all poems written by Dickinson that centralize around the theme of death and can be correlated around that theme.

In Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Last Night that She Lived” the first stanza explains the setting and the main idea of the poem. “ The last Night that She lived It was a Common Night Except the Dying- this to Us Made Nature different”(1-4) I believe that in this stanza she is trying to explain the night of the death of someone close to her. She explains that it was a common night like any other night but that dying is not common to her. Dying is something that she cannot quite understand. I also think that she purposefully capitalized certain words in the first stanza. She capitalized the words Night, She, Common Night, Except, Dying, Us, Made Nature. I think that she capitalized these words in the first stanza so that the reader would pay attention to them through out the poem. I also wanted to touch on the use of the word “Nature”(4) in this first stanza. Nature is a common theme in many of Dickinson’s poems. I think the use of nature in this stanza could also mean heaven or faith. I think that the dying of someone close to you can change how you feel about your faith.

The second stanza goes on to say “ We noticed smallest things- Things overlooked before By this great light upon our Minds Italicized- as ‘twere”.(5-8) In this stanza we get a look into how the death of this person is affecting her. It is...