Emily Dickinson "The Last Night That She Lived"

[summersun]

"Tomorrow were, a Blame"

You have to read it in connection with the rest:

Between Her final Room And Rooms where Those to be alive Tomorrow were,
a Blame

Between the room where she would spend her last time in and the rooms, where the others (who will still be alive tomorrow) are.
"A Blame" probably means something like it is unfair that she won't be there tomorrow anymore too.
Uh, and also, read further... "A blame that others could exist [...]" so yeah, it seems unfair, but I think it also has some irony/sarcasm in it, since it is not anyhow melancholic, rather superficial and indifferent...which can be because of the value of the change in their perception, which seems more important than the death itself. Complementing the 'faith to regulate', as mentioned before...but yah, I'm babbling on here

[Terry Nienhuis]

This poem is, I think, an exquisite expression of personal grief. I don't think it is necessary to turn it into an imagined description of the poet's own death. People die in our lives all the time, just as they did in Emily Dickinson's time, and those last moments of a loved one's death are terrifyingly powerful emotionally.

So, in this poem someone dies while loved ones are watching and waiting. On that last night, it would have seemed like an ordinary night to anyone outside the circle of mourners and it might, eerily, have seemed crazily ordinary to them as well. Flies still buzzed and, earlier in the day, light still came through the windows on a certain slant. But there was no denying to the mourners that this was a special night.

With heightened awareness, the onlookers noticed small things they had overlooked before, perhaps a crack in the ceiling or a stain on the floor. The intensity of their attentiveness to these details was like a great light, and these small things jumped out to them like italicized words on a printed page.

All night, the onlookers went out of the room and back into the room where the dying woman lay and the injustice of her death occurred to them. Tomorrow, others would continue to live and this woman would cease to be. She must "quite" finish her life this evening. But also, in another way of thinking, these onlookers envied this woman because her soul was going to eternal peace in heaven.

It was a "narrow" time as the onlookers waited for her to die, a tense time. Dickinson was the master of the untranslatable but perfect phrase or image. This "narrow" is one of them, like the one in her "snake" poem, "zero at the bone." And there will be another of these perfect but untranslatable phrases before we are done.

For the onlookers, their minds and souls were disturbed, "jostled," by this waiting experience, but eventually the moment of death came. The woman attempted to say something but struggled in her attempt and then lapsed into forgetfulness, as if she couldn't remember what she was trying to say. For any who have attended the last moments of the dying (at least the dying who are not in pain and unresponsive), this is a powerful, literal image. It doesn't have to be symbolic. Dickinson has chillingly described a very common but terrifying moment. The bending reed image is magical and the actual word of the poem, "struggled" scarce, is infinitely superior to the emendation in the version of the original post, "shivered." This and the emendation of the troubling last line are attempts to make the poem more accessible but these emendations should be ignored because the actual words are infinitely more evocative.

So the woman has finally given in to death and she is gone. The survivors arrange the hair on her forehead, adjust her head on the pillow, and then they must face the real challenge: how to fit this horrible pain into their notion of how the world works. They will have plenty of time to do this ("an awful leisure") but the actual last line, "Belief to regulate," is so much more encompassing than the misguided emendation, "Our faith to regulate." What "belief" is the poet referring to? It can be a religious belief but it need not be. And "regulate" is another incredibly evocative word. Luckily, these classic kinds of diction from Dickinson do not need to be translated. They need only to be felt, deeply.

If it makes anyone feel better, this poem was used in an early 1990's AP English exam and the last line defeated everyone's attempt to translate it, from the thousands of students who wrote on the poem to the hundreds of high school and college teachers who scored the student responses. As the Beatles might have said, let "Belief to regulate" be.

[josieH]

"As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame"


The living respond to the situation with a feeling of unfairness. As they move between the room encasing her deathbed and the "Rooms where Those to be alive tomorrow were" it is as if they are moving between two contrasting worlds. Although the woman is not yet dead, there is already a sense of distinct separation. Her close and certain death has placed her in a state of limbo, wavering between two juxtaposing realms. The finality of this premature separation, made increasingly vivid as they move between the two different kinds of rooms, evokes a brand of quiet anger towards what seems an unjust situation.

[Gladys]

As they move between the room encasing her deathbed and the "Rooms where Those to be alive tomorrow were" it is as if they are moving between two contrasting worlds.

I might paraphrase the quotation: After her death, they will occupy these other rooms for a time, but this death and living business is indelibly tainted with angst.