This essay is part a series by Father Stayer, a professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, reflecting on essential works of writing, art and music.
In his weekly interview with writers, Scott Heller of The New York Times asks the same final question: “You’re having a dinner party. What three authors do you invite?” Cue speculation about whether James Joyce would get along with Shakespeare, whether Proust could be coaxed out of his bed, whether prolific authors would be equally talkative.
Emily Dickinson is high on the list of people I crave to meet, but inviting her to a dinner party simply wouldn’t do. She would defer to everyone else, saying nothing, but storing up every glance and gesture, silently skewering the bourgeois pleasantries in her mind, and later in a poem.
Nor would I want to meet her alone. I would fear the intensity of her presence. Needing an escape route, I could only meet her in a public place, like a coffee house. There is a playful and witty side to this remarkable poet. But even if she would deign to meet me (not at all certain, for, as she said,“The Soul selects her own Society –/ Then – shuts the Door –”), I could never be easy in her presence. Anticipating her ferocious honesty, I would be sweaty and tense until finally I bolted from the café. I cannot dine with her. I cannot chat with her.
I keep a complete copy of Dickinson’s poems on my prayer stand. I pick it up to read before I pray, not because she is particularly religious—she is more often irreligious and irreverent—but because her bravery scours the surface of things until truth is revealed. As a consequence, I have read through Dickinson’s complete poems—roughly 1,800 of them—three times. It takes a few years. Although most of her poems are short, they are terse and chewy. They do not lend themselves to skimming, so I can never read more than two or three at a sitting. The effect of her poetry puts me in mind of T. S. Eliot’s description of reading Stendhal:
Stendhal’s scenes, some of them, and some of his phrases, read like cutting one’s own throat; they are a terrible humiliation to read, in the understanding of human feelings and human illusions of feeling that they force upon the reader (Eliot, “Beyle and Balzac,” 1919).
Such boldness, a stripping away of convention to expose the raw and real in the self—that’s as good a preparation for prayer as I can imagine.
Most of Dickinson’s poems are only two or three stanzas long. So it is unusual that “I cannot live with You” stretches to 12 stanzas. (Read ithere.) It begins baldly:
I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the ShelfThe Sexton keeps the Key to
To announce “I cannot live with You” suggests a distaste, some irritation this person provokes that makes living with him impossible to conceive. But the second line makes a U-turn: living with you, rather, would be capital-L “Life”—too bounteous, too perfect, unreal. And the speaker’s real life is something much more puny and banal. It exists somewhere “over there,” up on a disused shelf. The Sexton—a minor church official who keeps things in order—puts away the speaker’s life on that shelf, as if it were an unfashionable or broken cup:
Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
Old Ones crack –
(Sèvres—a suburb of Paris famous for its porcelain.)
Four parts, no title
Dickinson did not give her poem a title; it is conventional to refer to her poems by the first line. Nor does she divide this poem into sections, but the logical organization suggests four main parts. The first part explains to the addressee (some pined-for beloved) why she cannot live with him. The second part explains why she cannot die with him either:
I could not die – with You –
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down –
You – could not –And I – could I stand by
And see You – freeze –
Without my Right of Frost –
Death’s privilege?
Couples rarely die at the same time; one of the pair would need to close the eyes of the other’s corpse: “shut the Other’s Gaze down.” Her beloved could not bear such a pain, she believes. Conversely, neither could she watch him “freeze” without demanding “my Right of Frost,” the privilege of dying with him.
She cannot live with him, she cannot die with him. The third section explains why she could not be resurrected with him:
Nor could I rise – with You –
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ –
That New GraceGlow plain – and foreign
On my homesick Eye –
Except that You than He
Shone closer by –
In the bodily resurrection, the beloved’s face is all she could look for. Even Jesus’s face, freshly met (“New Grace”), would seem “plain – and foreign” to her eye. Unless the beloved stood “closer by” the speaker, with his shining face eclipsing Jesus’s, she would feel “homesick” for the beloved, even with both of them in heaven.
The Dickinson family was Calvinist in the New England manner. In the 19th century, congregational Calvinism made a stark distinction between the saved and the damned, administering a curious litmus test to determine the difference. Some upwelling of feeling, some surge of emotion that was physically felt by the believer was the sign that assured salvation. Dickinson never felt this emotion, though she would have been glad to experience it. (Another litmus test was a dying person’s final words, preferably a prayer or the name of Jesus. Among 19th-century Presbyterians, letters that report deaths feverishly scour the meaning of the last utterance or vaguely pass over in shame a final grunt or confused mumble.)
Dickinson, like many girls of her social class, spent a year away from her home in Amherst, Mass., boarding at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Mass. Its principal, Mary Lyon, had the students divide themselves into three categories: those who believed they were saved, those who had hope of such, and those who had no hope. (In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë satirizes this high-minded, Calvinist brutality in the figure of St. John Rivers.) Dickinson was a determined no-hoper. She casually joked about this problem in letters home, but the strength needed to withstand such peer pressure should not be underestimated. I imagine the teenage Dickinson standing her ground, arms crossed, glowering at the ninnies comfortably grouped on the other side of the classroom.
However well-intended such practices may have been, Dickinson perceived them as coercive. And she had too much integrity to fake an emotion, even though she trembled at the high stakes for her soul such rebellion entailed. For the rest of her life, hundreds of poems circle around the same mournful theme: her belief that she was denied salvation (“Why – do they shut Me out of heaven?”). She eventually distanced herself, to her family’s acute discomfort, from church services.
We could wonder what kind of poet Dickinson might have become had she been raised in a sacramental theology, one that looked mercifully on human failings and that offered regular help to the foundering—a theology that did not revel in “we, the saved” and “they, the damned,” but understood all as striving for salvation in community together. Dickinson might well have been happier, but we would have fewer of her astonishing poems. W. B. Yeats describes this source of poetry: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (“Anima Hominis,” Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1918). Dickinson never stopped quarrelling with herself about the promises and exclusions of her religion.
The anonymous ‘they’
Dickinson never married, though she fell in love with a number of unavailable men and women. This poem seems to point to her relationship with the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, a married Presbyterian minister with whom she corresponded and whom she met only a few times. (Also not to be underestimated with Dickinson: the powerful effect on her fervid imagination of one letter or one meeting.) She was crushed when Wadsworth left New England in 1862 for the mission territory of San Francisco. Dickinson’s poem was likely written in 1863—close in time to Wadsworth’s departure.
Back to the poem: in Christian theology, the resurrection is accompanied by judgment. The next two stanzas address not the judgment of the risen Christ, however, but some anonymous, gossiping “They”:
They’d judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –Because You saturated Sight –
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise
In their imagined union—which is simultaneously renounced—the speaker imagines them both being judged: he, because he “served Heaven” as a minister, and knows or seeks to know God, while she (in terrible, eloquent brevity) “could not.” The beloved’s shining presence “saturated” her sight, blinding her to the mere “sordid excellence” (marvelous phrase) of things that hold no interest for her, such as Paradise.
The first section, explaining why she cannot live with the beloved, took three stanzas. The second section, explaining why she cannot die with him, took two stanzas. But this third section, on resurrection and judgment, is the longest, six stanzas, because what is at stake here is the crux of the problem. In the poem, this minister who “served Heaven” does not seem to be married (though in real life, Wadsworth had a wife and family). So in the poem, the obstacle to their union is not a previous marriage but religious difference. For Dickinson, this is the internal quarrel that generates the most poetry. Heaven holds no interest for the speaker, because the beloved is more absorbing than God. But with the introduction of judgment into the equation, their differing fates dominate her speculations.
And were You lost, I would be –
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame –And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –
Were he “lost”—that is, damned—she would be (lost and damned) too, even if she were the most well-known saint in heaven (“Though My Name/ Rang loudest/ On the Heavenly fame –”). Conversely, if he were saved and she condemned, then the tortures of hell would be of no consequence. Her distance from him (“I – condemned to be/ Where You were not –”) would itself be the torment.
Writing at such a pitch of emotion, exploring in practical and theological detail every aspect that bars their union, what resolution can be made? None. Only a quiet stanza of six lines:
So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
It looks like six lines, but really it is five: the final word (“Despair”) that would couple with “Prayer” has been knocked down, stumbling into its own line. Even Dickinson’s formal lineation forces apart what might naturally go together.
The poetic resolution is magnificently stark, blending oxymoron, paradox and silence where explanation cannot salve. The oxymoron is the phrase “meet apart.” One meets together, but one stays apart. With this simple collision of words that don’t belong together, Dickinson summarizes the conundrum of the poem. The next line makes the oxymoron visual. A set of directions are given—here’s what we’ll do: you there, I here. Yet note Dickinson’s idiosyncratic, intentional punctuation; the “I” is starkly isolated by dashes: “You there – I – here –.” The beloved has a “there” to go to, but aurally and visually, the “I” is stripped and alone. This distance needs a metaphor, an image to make it come alive poetically. With the speaker and beloved separated yet held together, the image she offers is “just the Door ajar/ That Oceans are.” An open door is wide and inviting, but this space cannot be passed through. Its measure is only an inch or so, so close is the distance separating speaker and beloved. Yet that inch of distance is as immense as an ocean.
Subverting expectations
The poem might have ended there, on this fourth, expected line. But the author subverts expectation by adding two extra lines. To the abyss of the ocean, that vast emotional and spiritual space separating her from the beloved who is yet physically near, she adds two more elements that fit in that space: for him, prayer—the very thing that sustains him. And for herself who cannot pray, “that White Sustenance –/ Despair.” The food that sustains us we experience as richly colored: the reds and browns of stews, the earth tones of vegetables, the vibrant colors of fruits. Yet the food of this stanza is the opposite, merely a “Sustenance”—something that barely keeps alive. It is white and unappealing, like dust. Then, this unusually garrulous poem ends on a single note, the unapologetic word, staring blankly at reality: “Despair.” There is no other name for her emotion, no other way she can pray.
James Longenbach has described this final stanza as “both witheringly stern and wildly metaphorical in its acceptance of human limitation…. Solitude is not a state merely to be chosen. The space between any two human beings, however proximate, is as immense as an ocean, and Dickinson lived and wrote in order to honor that immensity” (The Virtues of Poetry, 2013). In this poem, there is no imagined romantic resolution, no sighing after would-be’s, and no comforting heaven where every tear is wiped away.
Dickinson either chose not to marry—a hardship in a culture that had little use or respect for spinsters. Or she was kept from marrying by circumstance. Some vague references seem to point to epilepsy, a shamefully guarded secret in the 19th century. Further burdened by a cruel theology, she surveyed her constrained world and harnessed her powers to write herself into existence. By force of her imagination and skill, she could take the measure of solitude, opprobrium and even damnation. What it cost her, we can never fully know. But the traces of that struggle can be found in her tightly compressed stanzas, the knife-edge of her metaphors, the lyrical melancholy of her singing.
Read next: Why you should read Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’
