Emily Dickinson I Cannot Live With You Analysis

"I Cannot Live With You" is one of Emily Dickinson’s famed love poems, close in form to the poetic argument of a classic Shakespearean sonnet. The poem advances her thoughts about her lover, slowly, from the first declaration to the inevitable devastating conclusion. This poem, however, argues against love. The poem can be broken down into a series of five assertions. The first explains why she cannot live with the object of her love, the second why she cannot die with him, the third why she cannot rise with him, the fourth why she cannot fall with him, and the final utterance of impossibility. In the first three stanzas, the speaker’s life is like that of metaphorical china, of which has been “discarded,” “broken,” “cracked,” and
The lines from these stanzas alternate between long and short, and becoming increasingly dramatic and despairing, particularly in the latter. The cracks may refer to the mental weight the speaker carries that is becoming overwhelming. In the next set of stanzas, the speaker asserts that the alternative choice to being unable to live with someone is to parish with them, but that has also been denied to her. She cannot live with him if she is lives, and in death, the “with” is taken away, too. She could die, but not with him because death is a private act. She argues that she has to wait to “shut the Other’s Gaze down,” the other being her lover, and to shut his gaze could mean to literally close his eyes. The Gaze could also imply that there is something sustaining in his longing, loving gaze upon her; it gives her life, and must be shut in order for death to occur. In the following line of “You- could not-” she has doubts that he would have the strength to do that for her. Her next argument is, that after his death, she would be denied the “Right of the Frost” and would only be able to long for death in his absence, but not attain it for herself. The next section refers to her final judgement, and how it may be overwhelmed by her