Poem: The Last Day

Overview

Edward Young’s The Last Day (1713) is a prophetic, devotional poem that stages the Christian Day of Judgment with Augustan polish and Miltonic grandeur. Across a sweeping panorama of cosmic catastrophe and moral reckoning, the poem imagines time ceasing, the dead rising, and all humanity summoned before Christ’s tribunal. Its urgency is pastoral and admonitory: worldly brilliance, wit, and power are measured against eternity, and only sincere piety and repentance stand. The voice alternates between awe and rebuke, pity and terror, pressing readers to contemplate the scale of divine justice and the vanity of temporal glory.

Structure

The poem unfolds in three books that move from apocalypse to assize to sentence. First, creation collapses: the sun is darkened, the stars fall, the elements ignite, and the trumpet shatters sleep’s last hold on the grave. Next, the court assembles: angels marshal the risen multitudes, the books are opened, and conscience becomes a witness. Finally, verdicts divide the company of mankind: the faithful enter joy, the presumptuous and impenitent fall to despair. The progression is cinematic and juridical, turning from spectacle to cross-examination to irrevocable decree.

Scenes and Imagery

Young paints the end of nature with a painter’s contrasts and a preacher’s urgency. Oceans return their dead, mountains crack like brittle glass, and cities vanish in the blaze. Time is personified as a spent harvester whose scythe is broken; Death, dethroned, yields up his captives. Trumpets, thunders, and earthquakes supply the acoustics of dread, while radiant angelic ranks and the unveiled Judge bring an overwhelming light. The moral theater includes kings stripped of pomp and beggars lifted into view, scholars and wits speechless before a Wisdom not of schools, and skeptics forced into belief by the irresistible presence of the Judge they denied. Scenes of terror are counterpoised with glimpses of beatitude: the meek crowned, tears wiped, and love perfected.

Themes

Equality at the bar of heaven annuls earthly hierarchies. Reputation, wealth, birth, and eloquence prove weightless beside sincerity of heart. Justice is exact yet tempered by mercy, which is offered in time and confirmed beyond time for those cleaving to grace. The poem targets fashionable unbelief, deism, ridicule of faith, the cult of wit, and exposes it as bravado before the abyss. Memory becomes a court within the court: actions long forgotten return vivid and undeniable, and conscience testifies with a clarity impossible to silence. The contrast between fleeting applause and durable virtue recurs, urging readers to exchange glitter for gold.

Voice and Style

Composed in polished heroic couplets, the verse balances antithesis and epigram with the sublime reach of apocalyptic vision. Young adopts Miltonic scale for cosmic scenes while retaining Augustan sharpness when admonishing courtiers, critics, and libertines. Apostrophes to angels, time, and sinners energize the rhetoric; pointed questions dramatize the soul’s cross-examination. The music is both public and intimate, fit for a crowd, yet aimed at a single conscience.

Purpose and Effect

The Last Day seeks to awaken a slumbering age. By magnifying the final audit, it diminishes the claims of fashion, party, and pride, and dignifies humility, charity, and faith. Its spectacle is finally medicinal: terror to rouse, promise to heal. The world dissolves so that the enduring world can be seen, and the poem’s closing emphasis is not on flames and trumpets but on the soul’s preparedness for a kingdom that does not burn.