Nobody remembers their first day alive, and nobody can remember their last. Dickinson's speaker claims both. "I recollect it" appears twice, the second time with a small, steady "as well." The claim is impossible, since a person cannot recall dying, so the voice must be speaking from somewhere beyond life. Dickinson often lets her speakers talk from that vantage point, as in "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died," and she does it here with great economy. Even the phrase "was a Life" is odd. Existence becomes a role someone holds for a while, with a first day and a last, like a post that is taken up and then given back.
The poem's central idea is a comparison between two kinds of silence. The first day was "How still," and the last was "stiller." The second stanza turns on a small piece of wordplay: "'Twas stiller – though the first / Was still –." "Still" means quiet and motionless, but "though the first was still" can also be heard as "even so, the first was quiet." The word quietly contradicts itself, which suits a poem about two silences that are alike and not alike. The stanza then sets them side by side: the last day was "empty – but the first / Was full." Birth is a stillness with something in it, a held breath. Death is a stillness with nothing in it. The slant rhyme of "still" and "full" matches this. The sounds are close but the vowel has shifted, as the two days resemble each other without being the same.
The form supports the meaning. Lines shrink and stammer, down to single words and two-word fragments ("Toward Men –"). The dashes cut the thought into pieces, so the poem seems to be assembled from what memory can still reach. The rhyme is sparse and mostly approximate, which makes the one full rhyme in the third stanza stand out. "But then" and "Toward Men" click together, and the click lands on the word "Men," on other people.
The third stanza is the hardest. "Finallest" is a coinage. "Final" is already absolute, yet Dickinson stretches it into a superlative, as if the usual word were too weak for the weight it has to carry. Then comes "My tenderer Experiment / Toward Men." An experiment is a tentative trial, and "tenderer" suggests both gentleness and soreness. The grammar never says which day is meant, so I read the phrase as an inference. It could be birth, a first gentle attempt to live among people, or it could be that dying, too, is an approach toward them. The poem seems to want that ambiguity, since each reading changes which day looks more hopeful.
The last stanza asks a question and then declines to answer it. "Which choose I?" may mean which of the two days the speaker would choose. "Which choose They?" turns the question outward to other people. The speaker's reply is "That – I cannot say," and the final instruction is "Question Memory!" The quotation marks around the questions make them sound overheard, as if someone else were asking. The exclamation mark is oddly forceful for such a helpless answer. Memory, which seemed so confident at the start, is now the only witness available, and the speaker hands the case to it. The "say" and "They" at the ends of the lines rhyme and hold the stanza together as its meaning loosens.
What makes the poem significant is how much it fits into sixteen short lines. It covers the whole span of a life, from beginning to end, without a single comforting image. There is no heaven and no consoling light, only two qualities of quiet. It is also typical of Dickinson in making the reader do the work. Capital letters and dashes make each word count, and the gaps leave the reader to decide what the "tenderer Experiment" is and which silence is worse. For a student, it shows how a poem can say something large by pushing one ordinary word, "still," until it means several things at once.