Last Words

Suppose "you are on your deathbed," the poet C. Day-Lewis ponders in a poem entitled "Last Words"; "with what definitive sentence will you sum / And end your being?" Betting that the premature deathbed speech is "just the game for a man of words," Day-Lewis's question stands as a provocation, both to himself and to other poets, who find themselves attracted by the idea of authoring a death, even and especially their own.¹ But can any life be summarized and ended in a single definitive sentence? And if not, why are poets repeatedly drawn to the precise moment beyond which language is no longer possible? Pushing voice to its farthest limit, what exactly do poets hope to learn by imagining, and reimagining, the dying hour?

What follows are my first thoughts on last words, inspired by more than two centuries of British and American lyrics that take as their central subject the dying words or speeches of the unhappily condemned, mortally ill, or piously prepared. Last word poems can be found in ballads and sonnets, parlor poetry and political poetry, dramatic monologues and poetic dialogues, and elegies and epitaphs. As a group they transcend the formal properties of any one poetic type, sharing instead a single thematic preoccupation: the challenge of dying a linguistically meaningful death. Last words are, at base, a specifically literary problem. Whether written or oral, the question remains the same: what words are the right words for one's final conscious moments?

Poetry of course is not the only genre fascinated by the drama of the deathbed and the power of last words. Early-nineteenth-century Evangelical revivals produced a host of religious tracts, mourning manuals, published sermons, popular magazines, and fictional works, all of which idealized the power of dying words to ensure a good death and an even happier afterlife. Deathbed scenes in the nineteenth-century novel invariably incorporate what historian Pat Jalland identifies as the central distinguishing features of an Evangelical good death: a slow, painful, but fully conscious demise, borne with great fortitude and equanimity by the dying, who, in their final hour, dispense farewells and blessings to attentive family and friends.² In a good death, the dying offer proof of salvation through words of contrition, confession, conversion, faith, forgiveness, wisdom, or grace. Informed by three centuries of Ars moriendi literature, Victorians in particular valued last words for the spiritual, social, and familial functions they could perform: saving one's soul, settling one's affairs, leaving one's legacy, instructing one's heirs, planning one's funeral, and consoling one's family and friends.³ Yet actual deathbed scenes rarely approximated the idealized version promoted by didactic deathbed literature. Recordings of family deaths, in diaries and letters, suggest that "holy dying" was extremely difficult to achieve in practice, with most private reports of the deathbed recording "bland or banal" last words, if such words are recorded at all.⁴ Dying words of any kind are, in fact, hard to find in an age when newly discovered narcotics like morphine, chloroform, and ether made speech itself an unlikely event in one's dying days.

More than any other literary genre, poetry played an especially central role in Protestant death chambers, at once promoting the ideal of a good death and compensating for its absence.⁵ At the Victorian deathbed, relatives frequently read aloud poems, hymns, or favorite scriptural passages, made readily available in collections for the sick and suffering. Popular bedside companions compiled for both the dying and their watchers, like Mary Tileston's Sursum Corda or Priscilla Maurice's Prayers for the Sick and Dying, include entire sections of poems "Suitable to be read to Persons in their Last Hours." These books not only arm the sick with edifying lyrics on how to die well, they also provide deathbed attendants with exact instructions on how best to read the poems aloud ("very slowly, distinctly, with intervals; not in a whisper or in a loud voice, but clearly and calmly").⁶ Because the Evangelical model of a good death required words of uplift, poems were often at the ready to provide meaningful...