The comma at the first line-break suggests that perhaps they not only
did not speak of the past, but were not speaking at all. The awkwardness
of stressing the last syllable of ‘visited’ to make the rhyme hints at the
strenuous brightness of the conversation required to break that silence,
and calling the days ‘long dead’ hints that the present question is hope-
lessly, tragically rhetorical, for neither then nor now is there an answer,
nor can he raise the dead again. Exactly as the last stanza promises to give
up the argument because it is pointless, it immediately flares up again:
Well, well! All’s past amend,
Unchangeable. It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon... O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing –
Not even I – would undo me so!
‘Well, well’ is sadly resigned, but its exclamation mark makes it equally
hurtfully brisk, as if washing its hands of her death in two words, or even
accepting this novel turn of events with some fortitude. Pretending to
accept loss faster than one actually can is common among those deeply
hurt, but at the same time its impoliteness marks the way the poem turns
to mourning himself as if she were still within earshot. Even as the final
sentence alters the tenor of the whole poem by acknowledging that her
unwitting participation in his tragedy may not have been intended, there
is a sudden irruption of domestic antagonism. ‘Not even I’ could know
how quick your death would be; ‘not even I’, the wicked husband whom
you believe has long plotted your death like Dr Crippen; ‘not even I’, the
poet whose verse you hated because it foresees death for everything.^55
Emma’s death occurs in the middle of things, not at the end of them, and
the self-defensiveness of this outburst opens up again the question of her
not knowing. Could she not know that her death would hurt him so,
because not even he could know how much it would hurt? Or could she
not know this because she was too insensitive to imagine it?
In ‘Your Last Drive’, too, her unawareness then that this was her last
view of the lights or that she was passing her grave is not just a reminder of
the unexpectedness of death. Rather, her heedlessness and lack of dis-
cernment parallels her heedlessness now, as if death had changed nothing
for her. As her face already tells of her death, so her countenance has ‘a
flickering sheen’, as if its expression were a pre-recorded film and she
already gone. This sense of continuous unawareness between life and
death is strengthened when it becomes the point of another argument.
174 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism