Religion/ Critique of Christian Values

“I Cannot Live With You”
Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. When the first
volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning
success.
The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-
sighted observers. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to
inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively
elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.
Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and influenced by the 18th-century
hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even of grammar,
and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original.
Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression and we see a Romantic quest for
the transcendent and absolute.
"I Cannot Live With You" is one of Emily Dickinson’s great love poems, close in form to the
poetic argument of a classic Shakespearean sonnet. The poem shares the logical sensibility of
the metaphysical poets whom she admired, advancing her thoughts about her lover, slowly, from
the first declaration to the inevitable devastating conclusion. However, unlike most sonnet
arguments or "carpe diem" poems, this poem seems designed to argue against love.
Religion/ Critique of Christian Values
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” 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.”
Tensions between the speaker's competing allegiances register forcefully. No orthodox believer
herself, she recognizes both the allure and strictures of the Church, honoring yet manipulating
some of its central emblems to make her case. She is also audacious enough to imagine a death
pact with her lover whereby she claims the "Right of Frost" as her "privilege." Unapologetically
passionate, she imagines her sight "saturated" by her lover's presence, rendering any other
excellence—even the Christian Paradise—degraded in comparison. And in a glorious rendition
of love's twin poles of self-sacrifice and greed, stanzas ten and eleven make plain that while she'd
be lost in Heaven if he were damned, she'll be damned if she'll surrender him to salvation.
The final stanza seems to be one of the most overwhelmingly pained and resigned protests in
verse. For Dickinson—the recluse who, paradoxically, valued personal attachments more highly
than almost any other life experience—separation from a loved one amounts to Hell. The last six
lines forsake the symmetry of the previous eleven quatrains, and desolation inheres in each
syllable and juncture: in the choked finality of the heavy stresses and strong caesuras ("You there
— I — here"); in the emotional abyss that opens with an enjambment ("With just the Door ajar/
That Oceans are"); in the oxymoronic precision of "meet apart" and "White Sustenance —/
Despair." In this stanza and in hundreds of others, Dickinson resembles Shakespeare, one of the
few other poets in English to achieve such a level of volcanic energy.

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“I Cannot Live With You”

Religion/ Critique of Christian Values

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