Emily Dickinson

1. FURTHER READING
Joan Burbick, “Emily Dickinson and the Economics
of Desire,” in Critical Essays, Judith Farr, ed., 76–
88; Joanne Feit Diehl, Romantic Imagination, 25.
“I cannot live with You—”
(1863) (Fr 706, J 640)
In this beautiful litany of loss, the best-known of
Dickinson’s love poems, the speaker moves through
a series of states of being with her beloved, finding
each one barred to her. Since she cannot live, die,
be resurrected, be judged by God, lost or saved
with him, they “must meet apart,” in a place para-
doxically defined as minuscule and vast, and nur-
tured by “that White sustenance—/ Despair—.”
In each hypothetical, rejected vision of meeting,
the speaker unflinchingly juxtaposes the intensity
of their love with the limiting reality confronting
them.
In the first stanza, the poet rules out the possibil-
ity of actually living with her beloved on the grounds
that “It would be Life—/ And Life is over there—
/ Behind the Shelf.” Read in isolation, the lines
have the half-bitter, half-resigned quality found in
so many Dickinson poems in which the speaker
acknowledges hunger and deprivation as a primary
condition of her existence. In works such as “GOD
GAVE A LOAF TO EVERY BIRD—,” “VICTORY COMES
LATE—,” and “WHO NEVER WANTED MADDEST JOY,”
satiety and fulfillment are elsewhere, out of reach,
withheld from her.
However, as the first and second stanzas are
joined by the enjambed lines, “Behind the Shelf /
The Sexton keeps the key to—,” another meaning
for “Life is over there” emerges. For the “porcelain”
a church sexton locks up is the vessel used for the
ceremony of wine and bread of the Lord’s Sup-
per. The Life “Behind the shelf” thus refers to life
eternal, which is symbolized by the Christian ritual.
The speaker implies that she cannot live with her
beloved because that would be Life, a fulfillment
challenging God’s paradise. This tension between
earthly and eternal life runs through the poem.
As biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff puts it, “the
very nature of the lovers’ excellence is a force that
might disable God if it were permitted to exist”
(Emily Dickinson, 419).
Dickinson used the image of a “porcelain life”
earlier, in a letter to SAMUEL BOWLES, the crusad-
ing editor of the Springfield Republican, whom she
revered, in which she asks about his and his family’s
health. Explaining her anxiety for them, she writes:
I hope your cups are full. . . . In such a porcelain
life, one likes to be sure that all is well, lest one
stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken
crockery. (L 193, late August 1858)
Here Dickinson takes the Psalmist’s symbol of
a life overflowing with blessings, “My cup runneth
over,” and transforms it into a complex image of
both mortality and the destruction of romantic
hopes (possibly hers for Bowles). In light of these
associations, the “Sexton,” “Putting up / Our Life—
His Porcelain—/ Like a Cup—” becomes a deity
indifferent to human happiness. Not only is the
Cup fragile, it is devalued by the keeper of mun-
dane orderliness: “Discarded of the Housewife—/
Quaint—or Broke—.” The notion of broken lives/
hopes is carried forward in the final evolution of
the crockery image, “A newer Sevres pleases—/
Old Ones crack—,” which suggests that the lovers’
relationship is an old one.
Having thus “explained” why she and her lover
cannot live together, the speaker goes on, in the next
two stanzas, to say why they could not die together,
perhaps in a suicide pact, as critic Vivian Pollak sug-
gests (Anxiety of Gender, 182–183). Here the barrier
is that “One must wait / To shut the Other’s Gaze
down—,” that is, to perform the ritual of closing
the eyelids of the deceased, and neither would be
capable of waiting. “You—could not—” she tells her
beloved, but whether this inability would stem from
excess of grief or because he is much older and thus
likely to die first, or some other reason, we are not
told. As for the speaker, seeing him die would be
impossible for her without dying instantly herself,
claiming her own “Right of Frost—.”
Judith Farr has written that this poem’s “dark
and harrowing logic has made it a model of poetic
argument” (Passion, 308). The key word here is
90 “I cannot live with You—”
023-238_C C-Dickinson-P2.indd 90 9/19/06 6:18:35 PM

2. poetic, for it is difficult to see any simple logic in
the argument of these stanzas. Since neither lover
could wait, they might indeed die together. More-
over, as Pollak writes, there is no compelling reason
“why a corpse needs to have its eyes closed, unless
she is implying that she needs help with dying, and
that her lover would be incapable of murder . . .
(Anxiety of Gender, 183). For Pollak, the only way
to see the stanzas as “internally consistent” is to
assume that “the real problem is not her inability
but her unwillingness to die herself or to cause her
lover to do so.” This is reading in a great deal, how-
ever. It seems simpler to assume that “logic” is sec-
ondary here to the logic of emotion, the speaker’s
simultaneous convictions that she could not live
a moment if her beloved were dead, but that any
shared experience, even the transition from life to
death, would be denied them. In all her poignant
“explanations” of why she and her lover cannot be
together, the deep, immovable conviction of the
impossibility of love’s fulfillment precedes argu-
ment or evidence.
The next two stanzas, 6 and 7, form “the hinge
upon which the verse turns from earth to heaven”
(Wolff, Life 421). Dickinson has a number of poems
in which she anticipates a reunion in heaven with
a beloved denied to her on earth. Thus, in a related
poem written the previous year, “THERE CAME A
DAY—AT SUMMER’S FULL—,” she describes the
renunciation of an earthly love, but anticipates a
union beyond the grave, in “that New Marriage—/
Justified—through Calvaries of Love!” In Fr 706,
however, she devotes six stanzas to naming the
obstacles to a reunion in heaven:
Nor could I rise—with You—
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’—
That New Grace
Just as in girlhood Dickinson found herself lov-
ing the world too well to declare for Christ during
the Calvinist REVIVALS that regularly swept through
AMHERST, so in this poem she rejects Jesus’ glory
as an inferior substitute for her earthly lover’s. The
lines resonate with a brief letter she sent, around
1877, to the radiantly handsome Bowles, possibly
the beloved of this poem, whose relentless social
activism in spite of ill health endowed him for her
with an aura of saintliness. Apparently acknowl-
edging the receipt of a photograph, she writes, “You
have the most triumphant Face out of Paradise—
probably because you are there constantly, instead
of ultimately—” (L 489). As Farr notes, the vision
of the lover’s countenance eclipsing Christ’s recurs
in the image patterns of the letters and poems
Dickinson wrote to the man she called “Master.”
Without the radiance of her beloved (“Except that
You than He / Shone closer by—”), she continues,
she would be homesick in heaven. Homesickness,
we should note, tormented the homebound Dick-
inson, whether on earth or in heaven, as she wrote,
in 1862: “I never felt at Home—Below—/ And in
the Handsome skies / I shall not feel at Home—I
know—/ I don’t like Paradise—” (Fr 437). Here,
she is homesick for the “Life that never could be,
an ordinary, domestic life infused with the radiance
of his love” (Wolff, Life 421).
Then, too, she writes in stanzas 8 and 9, Judg-
ment would come between them, since, although
the beloved tried to serve Heaven, she, as his idola-
ter, could not:
Because You saturated sight—
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise
Dickinson’s heresy in dismissing God’s gift of
eternal life as “sordid” is consistent with “her life-
long recognition that she can love people (her
friends, Sue, Master) more than God” (Passion,
126). Farr sees another version of this stance in the
famous letter Dickinson sent to her future sister-
in-law, SUSAN HUNTINGTON GILBERT (DICKINSON),
that begins, “Sue—you can go or stay—” (L 173,
about 1854), in which she “opposes to the idea of
religion the burning reality of love. Dickinson imag-
ines herself on the . . . Day of Judgment claimed by
the Devil . . . while Sue, who loved Jesus Christ, is
saved” (124).
Reading the next two stanzas, in which the
speaker considers the possibilities that she might
be saved and he lost, or vice versa, Pollak accuses
the speaker of not “understanding the relationship
between the attempt to serve heaven, in which
“I cannot live with You—” 91
023-238_C C-Dickinson-P2.indd 91 9/19/06 6:18:35 PM

3. she claims not to have participated, and the end
product, grace” (Anxiety of Gender, 184). But
Dickinson understood the relationship very well
and is only denying her prospects for happiness in
the next life from every conceivable perspective.
The Heaven and Hell of the self are in any case
what concern her, as she tells us when she writes
that, if he were saved and she “condemned to be
/ Where You were not / That self—were Hell to
me—.”
In the final stanza, two lines longer than the
others, as if to imitate the distance separating
them, she drops the negatives and says not only
what can happen, but also what must: “So we
must meet apart—.” Farr notes that “To ‘meet
apart with door ajar’ is a concept taken from the
very pattern of Dickinson’s daily life in 1862. She
met people behind doorways; she met them in
letters; she met them by sending herself in spirit
to their rooms” (Passion, 308). Within the space
of the final stanza, the slender opening of the
“Door ajar” between the lovers expands into three
immensities: Ocean, Prayer, and “that White
Sustenance—/ Despair—.” Note how meaning is
reinforced by sound in the progression from “Door
ajar” to “Oceans are,” to “Prayer,” to “Despair,”
and how the very sounds of the word Prayer are
reconstituted in the word Despair. For Dickinson,
prayer was most often associated with the despair
of knowing God is not listening, or, if listening,
not caring.
In what sense does despair sustain her? Scholar
Gary Stonum suggests that despair “can both sus-
tain itself and be sustained by the lovers. In con-
trast to a consuming and apocalyptic presence, it
can be prolonged without requiring the parties to
be consumed” (Dickinson Sublime, 161). Despair
sustains Dickinson’s art as well, providing the emo-
tional core of her love poetry. The sustenance it
offers is White, a word she associated with death
but also with the purity and integrity of her calling
as a poet.
See also “IF I MAY HAVE IT, WHEN IT’S DEAD,” “NOT
IN THIS WORLD TO SEE HIS FACE—,” “OF COURSE—I
PRAYED—,” “WHEN I HOPED, I RECOLLECT,” MASTER
LETTERS, and PURITAN HERITAGE.
FURTHER READING
Sharon Cameron, “The Dialectic of Rage,” in Mod-
ern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, ed., 118–121;
Judith Farr, Passion, 124–125, 306–308; Vivian R.
Pollak, Anxiety of Gender, 181–184 Gary Lee Sto-
num, Dickinson Sublime, 160–161; Cynthia Griffin
Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 417–423.
“I can wade Grief—” (1862)
(Fr 312, J 252)
In this exploration of her own and the human
capacity to bear grief and joy Dickinson begins and
ends with a boast. Grief is her natural element, she
tells us; she is a regular athlete when it comes to
traversing “Whole Pools of it”—and keeping her
head above water. We can interpret this as a rev-
elation of a perverse innate disposition that made
her more comfortable when she was miserable; but
it may also be seen as a simple statement of fact.
For, by the time she wrote this poem, at age 32,
Dickinson had experienced—and survived—the
deaths of such intimates as her close friend SOPHIA
HOLLAND, and her mentors LEONARD HUMPHREY
and BENJAMIN FRANKLIN NEWTON, as well as the
deaths of neighbors and acquaintances, many of
whom were young. She had also experienced the
loss or waning of once intense friendships. Although
shaken by these griefs, she had learned to live with
them. But joy is a dizzying, unaccustomed medium
for her. If grief is water, joy is air, a gust of wind
whose “least push” makes her drunk and throws
her off balance. Breezily defending herself against
the smiles of the watching pebbles, she tells us it
was only “the New Liquor” of joy that has affected
her. Whatever new joy in her life sparked these
words, there is no hint of it in the actual poem.
This is deeply characteristic of her poems, which
tell “all the truth” of her inner experience, without
revealing the external circumstances involved. (See
“TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT”). Thus,
the “New Liquor” can stand for all and any joys.
Dickinson speaks of herself as intoxicated in other
poems, for example, in “I TASTE A LIQUOR NEVER
92 “I can wade Grief—”
023-238_C C-Dickinson-P2.indd 92 9/19/06 6:18:35 PM