Julia Ward Howe opens "My Last Dance" with a ruin rather than a ballroom: an object burned out from within, its shell still standing until "some convulsive wind awakes." It is an odd start for a poem about a party, and the oddness is deliberate. The first eight lines set out a theory. Fire can gut a thing and leave its outline intact, and joys can do the same, looking fresh until a touch, "the breath of a caress," turns them to dust. The "golden fruitage" that hides a "scathèd bough" is the sharpest image of the idea: the surface glitters while the structure is damaged. The rest of the poem tests this theory on a dance floor.
The speaker goes to a ball where "the flowers, the music" are as they were of old. A young man with an "unfaded" cheek, whose look brings back her "buried brothers," asks the old question, "Will you dance?" Her response is almost mechanical: "I gave my hand, the old position took." Her body remembers what her spirit has lost. She is the standing shell, and the invitation is the wind.
The middle of the poem is its warmest stretch. She recalls dancing as "a gallant swimmer," flinging her breast "against the golden waves of sound." The word "golden" has returned, but now it describes real joy rather than a deceptive surface. Then she turns defensive: "Chide not,--it was not vanity, nor sense." Dance, she argues, is Nature "cadencing her joy of strength," the same measure that moves "the dancing Hours," "winds that sweep," and "stars that noiseless turn." Youthful energy, "unvow'd as yet to family or state," is made holy by white garments and flowered crowns. The more convincingly she defends the dance, the harder the collapse that follows.
The turn comes with a repeated phrase. Earlier she hailed "Sound, gladsome measure!" Now it is "Sound, measure! but to stir my heart no more." The same invocation has become a farewell. Her youth "fell from me," and "others showed them, smiling, in my face." I read this as the young dancers wearing the blooms she has lost. The cosmic rhythm of the earlier stanzas has narrowed to a "dizzy race" of "Fashion's galley-slaves," chained rowers who keep time because they must. Her own earlier image reverses too. She no longer rides the waves but is "an unaccustomed ghost / That starts, surprised, to stumble over graves."
The ending makes that stumble literal. Beneath her feet are graves whose "placid masks" smile "mournfully," and the dead tell her, "Tread lightly--thou art ashes, even as we." This line answers an earlier one. In youth her soul "shook the burthen of the flesh" and told the body, "Lie lightly thou!" Now the dead give the same instruction back to her. The soul once wanted a weightless body, and now the body is simply earth on its way to dust. "Ashes" also closes the circle with the fire in the first line, so the opening theory and the ballroom story prove to be one idea.
The form supports this. The poem is built from quatrains in mostly iambic pentameter, and only the second and fourth lines rhyme: "awakes"/"makes," "gleamed"/"seemed," "slaves"/"graves." The first and third lines of each stanza are left unrhymed, so the poem sounds like speech rather than song. That seems a pointed choice in a poem about dance, where regularity is the whole pleasure. Some rhymes barely hold, as with "caress" and "emptiness," which hints at the hollowness the poem describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy answers. A ballroom is usually a place for courtship and new beginnings, and Howe turns it into a memento mori without making the speaker bitter. She never dismisses her joy as foolish. She defends it, mourns it, and lets the dead have the last word, which gives the ending its quiet force.