The Poem
“I cannot live with You—” (the title is not Emily Dickinson’s, since she did not title her poems) is a poem of fifty lines divided into eleven four-line stanzas and a concluding twelfth stanza of six lines. The poem is an unusually long poem for Dickinson. It is written in the first person from the point of view of a speaker addressing a lover.
Structurally, the poem is a list of things the speaker and her lover cannot do together and the reasons why they cannot. In the first three stanzas, the speaker announces to her beloved that she cannot “live” with the person because of the nature of “Life” itself. Life as it is ordinarily conceived of by those who deal with it daily on its most basic levels—the “Housewife” and the “Sexton” who locks up and unlocks (“keeps the Key to”) both earthly possessions and the graveyard—is something subject to decay: It can “crack” and be “Discarded.”
The speaker goes on to assert in the fourth and fifth stanzas that neither could she “die” with her beloved, because one of them would have to remain alive in order to close the other’s eyes (“For One must wait/ To shut the Other’s Gaze down”). The speaker asserts further that logically it would be impossible for her both to “see” the beloved die (“freeze”) and to be dead at the same time (to have her “Right of Frost”).
In the sixth and seventh stanzas, the speaker explains why she could not “rise,” or be resurrected, with her beloved. Her reason is that resurrection to the “New Grace” of Jesus requires placing Jesus at the center of one’s life, acknowledging him to be, metaphorically, the brightest sun. The speaker’s “homesick Eye,” however, is focused on her beloved: “Because Your Face/ Would put out Jesus’.” The beloved not only is more central than Jesus to the speaker’s life but also entirely blots out the face of Jesus. The eighth and ninth stanzas then predict the inevitable judgment that would be brought about by the speaker’s blasphemy. The speaker’s only defense, however, is a reiteration of her blasphemy: Her beloved “saturated” her “Sight” so completely that she could no longer see (“had no more Eyes/ For”) more shadowy, “sordid” types of “excellence” such as God’s “Paradise.”
In the tenth and eleventh stanzas, the speaker cites further difficulties that could arise should the two lovers be resurrected and judged together: One of them could be damned and the other saved. Regardless, the speaker insists, her own “self” would be a “Hell” to her if she were separated from her lover. It is these reasons that lead to the conclusion of the final and longest stanza: “So We must meet apart.” Since the two lovers cannot be together, they can only be with each other by being apart and sustaining themselves with the only things they share: distance and “Despair.”
Forms and Devices
One of the most important devices used in the poem is metaphor, a figure of speech in which one thing is seen in terms of something else. The speaker of the poem uses the language of love—specifically, that of the renunciation of love—as a way of both denouncing and renouncing the traditional paradigm for human life set forth by Christianity.
The poem is structured according to the stages of human life as defined by this traditional Christian paradigm: life, death, resurrection, judgment, damnation/salvation, eternity. Rather than overtly criticize the adequacy of this model for human life, however, the speaker considers the value and “Sustenance”...
(This entire section contains 482 words.)
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afforded by this paradigm through an examination of its implications for a love relationship.
Within this larger metaphorical structure, the poem incorporates a parallel metaphor of sensory experiences that underscores the speaker’s rejection of both traditional definitions of “Life” and conventional modes of experiencing and perceiving “Life”; the speaker invokes images of eating, seeing, hearing, physical proximity, and again, at the end, eating. The first three stanzas employ images associated with eating in order to develop a metaphor for human life as it is traditionally viewed: “Life” is a piece of “Porcelain” or a “Cup” that contains the human spirit for a while until it cracks, breaks, or becomes outmoded (“Quaint”) and needs to be “Discarded.” The speaker implies that she and her lover require “A newer Sevres,” a finer piece of porcelain—in other words a newer, more elaborate metaphor for “Life.”
The fourth through the ninth stanzas focus on the process of seeing in order to critique traditional notions about death, resurrection, and judgment. In the traditional Christian paradigm, death is not subject to human intervention, resurrection is contingent on the “New Grace” of God, and judgment is solely the province of God. Through metaphors of sight, however, the speaker undermines God’s authority and power in all of these realms. In stanzas 4 and 5, death is redefined as the freezing of sight, and only the lovers have the power “To shut the Other’s Gaze down.” Similarly, in stanzas 6 and 7, it is the vision of the beloved’s face—not Christ’s—in the “Eye” of the lover that shines brighter and “closer” and that, therefore, makes possible resurrection.
Finally, in stanzas 8 and 9, the implications of this metaphor of the sun (with a pun on “son of God”) are fully developed. The speaker—in a dazzling metaphor of blindness—discounts conventional judgment and defends herself: She has been so ecstatically blinded (“You saturated Sight”) by the beloved that she no longer has “Eyes” and can no longer see such “sordid” things as traditional “Paradise.” In the final stanza, the speaker returns to the metaphor of eating to assert the lack of nourishment provided by the traditional model for human life; she and her lover have created a new form of “Sustenance”—“Despair.”
