Emily Dickinson, “The last Night that She lived” For Carol Cosman, 1943-2020
I wrote this essay when my cousin, Carol Cosman, died after a heroic three decade long struggle with cancer. I kept thinking, and thinking, of the last two lines of this poem. You will come upon them at the end of this letter. Carol is dead, but those of us who survive her, her husband and two sons, and her sister and mine and I myself, must live with what I call in the essay the ‘rubbishy aftermath.’
Death is hard to deal with. I am no afficionado, severely unpracticed in what in truth no human being ever comes to terms with. I say this to excuse my beginning this letter with philosophy. We turn to ideas, to abstraction, when reality is, in its actuality, too painful for us. Not Dickinson. As this letter proposes, she could look with a cold eye (Yeats’ epitaph was “Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by.”) on what lesser mortals talk around. Me, I talk around it, until at last I can talk no longer and face up to the reality.
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The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as 'twere.
As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame
That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite—
We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.
She mentioned, and forgot—
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce—
Consented, and was dead—
And We—We placed the Hair—
And drew the Head erect—
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—
One of the things I treasure about reading poems is that they teach us to see the world as carefully as it can be seen. Emily Dickinson is masterful at such seeing.
I’ve been talking over Zoom with Rob Faivre, a long-ago former student about looking at the world closely and in focus. Such looking is hard, though he and I don’t talk about that; moreover, and we do talk about this, it is impossible on some deep, philosophical level. We can only see what our perceptual apparatus – eyes, ears, consciousness – enables us to see; and our sensory and conceptual apparatus, consciousness above all, is always already shaped by the ways in which our minds work, and the ways in which our minds have learned to work. The structure of our brains, the structures of perception itself, always intervene between ‘reality’ and our consciousness, so that we see as we are pre-ordained to see.
That’s what Kant taught us: that there is a difference between the ‘noumenal’ world, the world out there, and the ‘phenomenal’ world, the world as we experience it. The early phenomenologists – I am thinking of Edmund Husserl here – urged philosophical efforts to ‘bracket’ things, to get back to where we first encounter an object before a lot of thinking and judging has taken place. Those efforts are doomed to failure if we want to know what is really out there, beyond the self, or even, as Husserl tried to do, see what it is that constrains our thinking. All we can do is see what the self allows us to see. What these phenomenologists wanted to chart was how perception worked at its most fundamental level, but perhaps even this is an ultimately unachievable endeavor.
I imagine that this is all a bit too philosophical a beginning In many of her poems Emily Dickinson tries to see what is in front of her eyes, unencumbered by superstition and expectation. That is a large and difficult task, for we have so thoroughly pre-judged the world in order to live in it, to avoid being ambushed by every little thing we encounter, to enable us to see our experience as ordered and hence predictable, that to see what is in front of our eyes is a huge effort. Even if, following Kant, we can never truly see what is out there, but can only see the world as we see it.
The poem before us, “The last Night that She lived,” is a poem about dying. Dickinson does not, in this poem, write about ‘death,’ which is a concept, but about dying, a process that begins perhaps with a lessening of consciousness and ends with a corpse, unseeing, unhearing, unexperiencing: Dead. The best poem I know on this fading of consciousness is a remarkable poem by William Carlos Williams, “The Last Words of My English Grandmother.” In that poem, a dying woman is taken by ambulance to a hospital; First she is angry at being debilitated, then she is paranoid about what is happening to her, and finally as her mind no longer functions, she “rolled her head away” from the external world, the world of perception, entering a place where there is no feeling, no perception. Death. She is dead.
Dickinson, in this poem, is concerned not as much with the dying woman who is at the center of the room, as with the perceptions of those who attend to her as she is dying. This is a poem of close observation, of the fading of the woman but more importantly of those who watch her dying, who experience the event in “just a country town.” (That phrase is from another poem of observation of the processes of death, this one of watching a funeral procession. “There’s been a death in the opposite house” is filled with humor: Boys joking about death and the mattress it occurred on, satires on the minister ‘taking command’ of the situation and on the funeral director not only measuring the corpse for the coffin but seeing how much money he can charge, and even recognizing that a funeral cortege is a kind of “dark parade.” But it also clearly, cannily, observes how death ‘marks’ a community.
So we finally come to the poem before us, “The last Night that She lived.” Seven four-line stanzas – quatrains – in which the second and fourth lines rhyme, although with slant rhymes (Night/different, before/’twere, Room/Blame, quite/infinite, time/came, Reed/dead, erect/regulate). She bends common or hymn meter – typically alternating six and eight line stanzas – so that each stanza consists of three six syllable lines and a third line of eight syllables.
[Does this matter? Yes. Meter and rhyme, and the larger regularities of rhythm and repetitive patterning, bring order into chaos.]
Let’s start, as we should, with the first stanza. There is an opposition here:
The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different
The opposition is, of course, between the “common” of the second line and the “different” of the last line of the stanza. What creates the difference, enables it? The lines are clear: “Dying.” “Except the Dying” intervenes, and makes what is a common experience, that of night and bed, into something which is remarkable.
We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as 'twere.
The poet observes the watchers in the room, who “notice smallest things—/Things overlooked before” because of the circumstance that death is near. The advent of death concentrates the attention, so that the “minds” of the watchers seem to be reading “italics’ in place of everyday prose. This is, of course, a metaphor, where the events of the evening are “italicized” from the ordinariness of usual evenings by the “great light” of impending death. [A Husserlian phenomenologist would say death ‘brackets’ these experiences. In my view, Martin Heidegger took this special circumstance and made it ubiquitous, the condition of all consciousness: Death brackets, ‘italicizes,’ life and all that it contains.] The people in that room, attentive to an unusual degree, are paying heed to all that is transpiring, every event, every “smallest thing.”
As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame
That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite—
Not only does Dickinson use enjambment – where one line flows past line divisions into the next – but she, here, makes a sentence that pours across the stanza ending. The line she is writing is: ‘As we went in and out of that room and those rooms where tomorrow the living would congregate, we felt a blame that others could exist while she was about to be dead and no longer existing.’ It makes sense. Life is ongoing, but she, the dying woman, is not. And we blame life for continuing while the dead are just that, dead, and not continuing. That disjunction, between finality and continuity, is not only a great mystery, it makes us unhappy with existence. Hence “Blame.” That unhappiness will recur, in an extraordinarily powerful return, in the final stanza. We also note that ‘blame,’ in the more common usage of that term, refers to the circumstance that we blame existence (death) for taking the one we love when so many of the ‘less exceptional/important’ are still alive and not chosen by death. This is the famous complaint of Frederic Henry in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
One of the difficult things we encounter in reading Dickinson is that her poems move as the mind moves: that is to say, without the smoothness of such imposed devices as ‘plot’ or ‘continuity.’ Immediately after the long sentence about blaming life for going on while death is final, after seeing that we do not reconcile ourselves to irreversible endings while we must go on and on, come two lines which seem to issue from a different part of her mind: “A Jealousy for Her arose/ So nearly infinite—” Why should those who observe be jealous, when a moment before they were full of blame? I think the last two lines of this stanza are not directly connected to what came before. Well, they are related in that the jealousy has in part its origin in the ‘fact’ that when we are dead we no longer have to deal with the pain of separation and of endings. We are dead, past all that.
But the jealousy is that those who die are now part of the realm of the infinite, of things beyond the measures of time. They are outside of time and suffering, of loss. She is (from a religious perspective) with God and the angels, while we muddle along in our rather secular world. Who wouldn’t be jealous? And even for the non-religious, she is beyond time, beyond suffering, part of all things. (Perhaps you recall that Wordsworth poem I sent out a decade ago? In which death intrudes, unmentioned, between the first and second stanzas?
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
This is the secular infinite: “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,/With rocks and stones and trees.”) Whether religious or secular, the merging with the infinite is something we can all be “jealous” of.
We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.
There are no problems about “she passed,” since the euphemism – the final parting – is ubiquitous. Why was it a narrow time? Let me have recourse to Walt Whitman, who Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson she neither read nor approved of. (“You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.”) Near the end of “Song Myself” Whitman speaks of birth, and of our entry into the world through a narrow place, from our mothers’ wombs into the light of common day Immediately, in the next line, he suggests our egress from the world, through death, is similar:
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.
Narrow is the gate by which we enter into the world, and narrow is the gate by which we leave it.
What remarkable words Dickinson writes! Long ago I had a teacher, Ennis Rees, a fine scholar and translator and a minor poet, who said any poet would give his right hand to create lines such as can be found in all her poems. Such is the following: “Too jostled were Our Souls to speak.” Souls? Jostled? We know what she means, even if the metaphor strains credulity: After all, how can incorporeal things like souls be ‘jostled,’ which is of course refers to a physical activity? Ah, we know, we know, what she means. We are shaken by immanence of death. Although I am much cruder than she is: “Too jostled were Our Souls to speak.”
And then the moment comes, the notice is given: Death is present. Hovering about and suddenly final.
She mentioned, and forgot—
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce—
Consented, and was dead—
The observers in the room watch the leaching away of consciousness, and the end of the struggle for life. Words do not come successfully and thought unravels, of no consequence. In an entirely natural process, like a reed bending down toward the water, with barely a struggle, the dying woman consents to what is before and upon her, and is dead. She does not embrace death, as Sylvia Plath might have done, but consents to it. The moment of dying is a yielding, all struggle past; it is as natural as that reed bending to the water as a breeze comes upon it. [When someone dies, I often send to their ‘survivors’ a poem that spoke powerfully to me, comforting me when my own father died. It is a poem by Rilke, The Swan, and it addresses this natural bending, as to water, when one moves from life into death.]
The final stanza is where Dickinson’s poem, to me, leaps beyond what has come before. As I said at the outset, Emily Dickinson is a very keen observer of what happens, in this case of what happens as someone is dying and the mourners gather round. Two other Dickinson poems that deal with this same moment are the insanely comic “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” and the delirious poem of mental breakdown, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.”
But here, before our eyes, the final stanza leaps beyond the moments leading up to, and the moment when, “She passed.” That final stanza is about the “rubbishy aftermath” of death – the phrase I have just quoted is from Faulkner, who writes in Absalom, Absalom, “there is no all, no finish; it is not the blow we suffer from but the tedious repercussive anti-climax of it, the rubbishy aftermath to clear away from off the very threshold of despair.” Here is Dickinson’s final stanza:
And We—We placed the Hair—
And drew the Head erect—
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—
Let’s start with the remarkable repetition of “We” that opens the stanza. That ‘we’ encompasses the observers of the scene, and all those who mourn the death of the woman who is presented to us in the poem But through its repetition it also encompasses we readers: All of us mourn loss which is final, be it of persons who die, or of our infancy and youth, or of . . . whatever.
Facing loss, we try to make it decorous. Our ceremonies try to bring order to what is not only final, but a final triumph of chaos and disorderliness, for death rearranges – more, wholly undermines – all that we found meaningful. We arrange the hair of the corpse, position the head. And then?
Astonishing lines. “And then an awful leisure was/ Belief to regulate—” No one else in my knowing could say of leisure that it is awful. And yet Dickinson does so, doubly. The leisure is awful, horrible, in that it gives us time we do not want to use, time to meditate on what we have lost and how irredeemable and irretrievable that which we have lost is. But the “awful” also signifies “awe-full.” We are full of cosmic astonishment at our sense that loss is not reparable, a continent – more than a continent – of dread that we must now live on for all our days.
“Belief to regulate.” How do we control, or normalize, our beliefs, so that we can keep on going in the aftermath of death and loss, knowing that perhaps there is no God (or why would we be bereft?) and no meaning to life (for why would it end, without meaning, without significance, just expiring in a bed?).
I think Dickinson is right. The ‘facts’ of death, its process unfolding before us, is not as difficult as the time afterward when we try to come to terms with it, and with our beliefs in – what? – life and love and meaning. The “leisure” after death and loss is endless and “awful,” and we work hard to regulate our beliefs.
But can those beliefs be regulated? I think the poem suggests that they cannot be. Here I have recourse to the roots our English language. The effort to shape “belief” (an Anglo-Saxon term) is likely to be more superficial (Latinate terms were grafted onto the earlier Anglo-Saxon), technological (“regulate” is one of those processes of mind that Latin is to useful at denominating ) and thus unsuccessful. Our deepest feelings cannot, in actual fact, be regulated. We live with them, always.
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—
Perhaps, amidst the joy and celebration, amidst the humdrum and the ennui, what we always feel, deep down, is mourning. We lose, life-long, even as we think we win things like accomplishment, pleasure, understanding. What is lost is gone, irretrievable (as I said earlier). Perhaps that is our deepest task in living: “Belief to regulate.” Maybe that is what we have, and death just brings it to the surface.
This is getting too deep for me. All I know is we lose people along the way. I have lost my parents, and my aunts and uncles (including Ted and Ruth, Carol’s parents among them), and my grandparents. My parents-in-law, and two brothers-in-law. Beloved colleagues Ken Rothwell and Mbulelo Mzamane. Long ago, my friend Jimmy Mann. And now Carol. Loss never ends. And we: We have belief to regulate.
Carol Cosman in her youth….
Footnotes
[1] This sentence sounds profound. Maybe it is. Walt Whitman, in his astonishing poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” wrote that maybe living with loss – in his case, vanished possibilities of love and its fruition – is what we have.
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death….
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word…
He is suggesting, to himself, that the only answer to loss is death: As Hopkins wrote, “Here! creep,/Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” I think my words and Whitman’s resonate deeply… But.
I was revising this letter on a bench by Lake Champlain when the two people on the bench next to mine took out instruments and began playing, on fiddle and guitar. American roots music. Lovely. And then they played, without fanfare, a violin piece by Bach. I wish I could tell you what it was – I have listened to excepts of dozens of his violin compositions, and the closest I can come to identifying it is the Gavotte of Bach’s Fifth French Suite. Perhaps it was that.
But it doesn’t matter what the piece was, because what was important was my recognition that at times Bach is not about loss or mourning. At times he is pure, unalloyed (no ‘loss’ to temper the metal of his composition) celebration of order, clarity, imagination. Pure celebration. So maybe sometimes, maybe even often, all seems tinged with loss. At other times, celebration is unalloyed.
I cannot come to a conclusion: Serendipity rules, or maybe it is context. Life is complex, and not easily reduced to formulae. As I told a former student, Dan Mees, hours after I had my realization while listening to Bach on the bench, “Happens to like is one of the ways things happen to fall.” Wallace Stevens wrote that.