Notice that the speaker does not specifically identify for what she is thanking God. It’s possible that from context readers could deduce what the speaker is thankful for; however, the ambiguity of the subject of these two lines suggests that on one level the speaker is blindly thanking God: the death and the aftermath of the death are so out of her control that all she can do is turn to God.
Thanking God could also be read as a reaction to the speaker’s nihilistic claim that this death has parted her from “the darling of [her] life.” At first, she sees the death through her own loss and the sadness over that loss rather than the subject’s desire to die. This abrupt shift to thanking God then could be read as her quickly moving away from thinking about her own feelings in order to see the death in a more positive light.
"The darling of my life from me..."See in text(Text of the Poem)
On the surface, these lines are about the speaker watching her subject experience the last moments of her life. However, these lines can also be interpreted as the speaker imagining her own death in the future. This means “The darling of my life” could be this person she is sitting with or it could be her own darling life. In either reading, the speaker suggests that with the death of this person, she has lost a part of herself; her vision of the world has irrevocably changed.
We can read “Longing” for the shade of death and “wishing” for the end of her subject’s life on two levels. The speaker can be viewed as wanting the end of the subject’s life to come about faster so that her pain and suffering ends. However, the language of these lines could also reveal the speaker’s unnatural fascination or affinity for death.
