After the Dinner Party”

“After the Dinner Party” initially presents the reader with two characters, sitting in silence, after a dinner party has left them entangled in loneliness and reflection. Although the party is over, the two hostesses can still hear the laughter and philosophy that the night was so rich with. As the night grows older and the “last logs, sag and wink” (line 5), the reader is ultimately left with a better understanding of the poems theme: the promise of life, the despair of death, and the fine line in between the two.
Throughout the poem there are leitmotifs and words used frequently to stress the poems general feeling of demise. After the dinner party the two hosts’ “sit at the table late, each, now and then/Twirling a near-empty wine glass to watch the last red liquid climb [italics mine]”(lines 1-2). The poems first two stanzas recurrently use words like late and last, words that initially give the poem a grim and hopeless feel. This feeling is used to parallel not...