The Paradox of Beddoes “Last Man”

                It seems that there are three requirements that need to be met for a person to be considered the “last man”: they have to be the last person on Earth, be alive and be a man (or at least a human being). Interestingly, the “last man” Beddoes writes on ultimately fits none of those descriptions.

                To begin with, though the title of the work ostensibly labels the speaker as a “man”, the text of the poem seems to contradict that notion. To begin with, Beddoes opens the poem with the following lines: “By heaven and hell, and all the fools between them, /I will not die, nor sleep, nor wink my eyes,/ But think myself into a god...” (Beddoes, 1-3). With these three lines, the speaker creates a divide between himself and all other humans. First of all, the speaker says that he will accomplish his goals “By heaven and hell, and all the fools between them”. Presumably, the “fools between them” are the inhabitants of Earth – humans. Yet, the speaker does include himself in this group of “fools”. Furthermore, he goes on to say that he “will not die, nor sleep, nor wink my eyes, but think myself into a god”. The speaker conceives himself as able to turn into a god by forsaking death and sleep – the two actions that all humans must share. Beddoes makes this point even more clear by ending the poem, “…Fear me now; / I am a devil, not a human soul –“(Beddoes, 12-13). The speaker has completed the journey and given up his humanity – thus making it impossible for him to be the “last man”.

                Besides being human, one would assume that any “last man” of Earth would need to be alive to carry the moniker. Yet Beddoes seems to leave the speaker’s mortal condition rather ambiguous in the poem, perhaps even indicating that the speaker is already dead when he begins his journey to dethrone Death. To begin with, the speaker’s pledge to “not die, nor sleep” until he reaches his goal seems to indicate that he cannot die or sleep. There is only way that a person cannot die or sleep: if they are already dead. The speaker could simply be pledging what he cannot actually accomplish, but, if one assumes the speaker’s pledges are given with conviction, then the speaker must be dead (or, as pointed out earlier, at least not human). Beddoes further indicates that the speaker has shuffled off the mortal coil when he writes, “…Or I will burst / Damnation's iron egg, my tomb, and come /Half damned, ere they make lightning of my soul,” (Beddoes, 6-8). The speaker seems to heavily imply that he is beginning his journey in his “iron egg”: a tomb. One could argue that the tomb the speaker speaks of his simply metaphorical. However, the fact that he is coming “half damned, ere they make lightning of my soul” seems to imply that he has already died and must accomplish his goal of slaying death before whoever “they” are (re)capture his soul. If the speaker had to escape from damnation to dethrone death, the implication is that he is already dead – preventing him from being the “last man” in any traditional sense.

                Finally, any “last man” must be the last (or think they are) person on Earth. Beddoes poem seems to imply that the speaker is not, in fact, the last person on Earth. The speaker establishes his ultimate goal thusly: “I'll dethrone / The empty skeleton, and be thy death,” (Beddoes, 10-11). The very act of becoming Death implies that there are still souls for Death to take. Though one could make the argument that the speaker simply wishes for a pyrrhic victory in which death is vanquished but nothing else is accomplished, the speaker refutes this position by commanding his audience to “fear me now”. In order for one acting as Death to inspire fear, there must be mortals that fear Death. If there are other mortals remaining, then the speaker cannot be the “last man”.

                By examining how the speaker defines himself as ultimately not a human, not alive, and not the last person on Earth, one can come to the conclusion that the speaker Beddoes labels as the “last man” is paradoxically neither the “last” nor a “man”. Beddoes, then, does not create a typical apocalypse or “last man” narrative. Yet, he still labels it as such, indicating that he feels the poem still fits within the typical apocalyptic genre of “last man” poetry. Ultimately, the “last man” Beddoes presents seems to have one goal: destroying and taking over the mantle of Death. Perhaps the world Beddoes presents is not ending in the traditional sense, but the person he defines as the “last man” is voluntarily leaving it. It seems to me that Beddoes wants to imply that the world has come to an end by this “last man” choosing to leave it and become a “devil”. It is this loss of humanity and reason and the abandonment of all pursuits non-combative that signals the end of the world for Beddoes, not a simple depletion of numbers.