Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Last Time" is a brief but profound meditation on mortality, consciousness, and the difficulty of fully grasping our own impermanence. Through a spare and direct dialogue, Howe captures the tension between intellectual awareness of death and the deeper, more elusive knowledge of our own inevitable passing. The poem presents a final conversation between the speaker and a loved one—likely her brother John, whose illness and death permeate much of her work—set in an intimate moment at a restaurant with "white tablecloths." This seemingly ordinary setting becomes the stage for a profound exchange about existence and its impending end.

The poem’s structure is entirely built on dialogue, which creates a sense of immediacy, as though the reader is overhearing the conversation. The repeated back-and-forth between "I do know" and "No, I mean know that you are" highlights the gap between understanding something abstractly and truly feeling it. The speaker asserts that she knows her brother is dying, but he challenges her—not just to acknowledge his death, but to confront her own. His insistence is striking: "What surprises me is that you don’t." This moment reveals a fundamental human paradox: we are all aware of death as an inevitable fact, yet we live as though it belongs to others, not ourselves.

The repetition of "know" in different variations—"I think I do know," "I do," "Know that you’re going to die," "No, I mean know that you are"—emphasizes the complexity of this awareness. It suggests that knowing is not a singular event but a layered experience. The brother’s final correction shifts the focus from himself to the speaker, forcing her to recognize that death is not just something that happens to loved ones but something that will happen to her as well. This moment carries a quiet but undeniable weight; it is not just about loss but about the universal certainty of human mortality.

The simplicity of the language and the conversational tone make the poem deeply intimate. There is no overt sentimentality, no dramatic outpouring of grief—just a stark, almost Socratic exchange that leads the speaker toward an uncomfortable truth. The setting—a restaurant with "white tablecloths"—suggests an atmosphere of civility and formality, making the rawness of the conversation stand out even more. The contrast between the structured environment and the existential subject matter underscores the poem’s theme: the inevitability of death is always present, even in the most ordinary moments.

In the end, "Last Time" is as much about the speaker’s realization as it is about the brother’s impending death. It leaves the reader with an unsettling but essential question: do we truly grasp our own mortality, or do we merely acknowledge it from a distance? The poem’s brevity mirrors the fleeting nature of life itself, and its unresolved ending lingers, prompting us to confront what we may not want to fully know.

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