A Dickinson speaker remembers both her first day alive and her last
Emily Dickinson gives us a narrator who can recall the first day she was a life and also the last. Both were still, she says, but the final one was stiller, and empty where the first was full. Asked who made the choice that ended things, she can only answer: ask memory.
Few poems start from a stranger vantage point. The speaker seems to look back from beyond some ending, comparing two days she remembers with equal clarity: the moment life began and the moment it stopped. Each was quiet, yet the second was quieter, and the contrast between full and empty does the emotional work without any description of what happened in between.
The third stanza hints at the cause. That last day was her "finallest Occasion", an invented superlative that sounds almost childish, and it followed a tenderer experiment toward men. Read that way, the death may be the end of a love rather than of a body, an inner life closing down after a romantic venture failed. The poem never confirms it. The closing lines pose two questions, whether she chose or they chose, and refuse to settle either, handing the verdict to memory.
The short broken lines, dashes and quoted questions create the sense of someone talking to herself, and the rhymes are loose in the way her later admirers found groundbreaking. It is also an example of how she approached mortality from odd angles, one of the two subjects that dominate her work alongside nature.
Memory of childhood was something her own family recorded. When she was two and staying at Monson, her Aunt Lavinia wrote that she was a contented and easy child, with a fondness for music and a particular gift for the piano, which the little girl called the moosic. She went to primary school in a two-storey building on Pleasant Street. At seven she received a letter from her father, Edward, urging the children to keep up their studies and report how much they had learned when he returned. Her letters speak warmly of him, while suggesting her mother was often cold and distant.
Source: The first Day that I was a Life
