706.1863.I cannot live with You –

ED’s alternative words in parentheses (Lines 35 and 49):

I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –

Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
Old Ones crack –

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?.

Nor could I rise – with You –
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ –
That New Grace

Glow plain – and foreign
On my homesick Eye –
Except that You than He
Shone closer by –

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 (consequence)
As Paradise

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 –

So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance (Exercise, Privilege) –
Despair –

My approach to reading Dickinson is biographical, which is anathema to poetry cognoscenti. My take is that there are too many enlightening correspondences between her poems and our historical knowledge to ignore its influences. Obviously, a host of ED fans have loved her poetry for 130 years without biographical details, but, to misquote ED, that’s just the way DNA made me (Franklin ML3).

ED lists many reasons why she could not live with Wadsworth, for example, Stanzas 4-5, F706, second half of 1863, [brackets mine]:

“I could not die – with You –
For One [of us] must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down – [after death]
You – could not – [close your eyelids after your death]

And I – Could I stand by [alive]
And see You – freeze – [watch your body cool after death]
Without my Right of Frost – [Right to die with you]
Death’s privilege?”

ED faced her imagined reality of her life in Amherst and Wadsworth’s in San Francisco, the two communicating “With just the Door ajar / That Oceans are [Atlantic and Pacific] – and Prayer”. She predicts that seeing Wadsworth after death would “Outvision(s)” everything else in “Paradise”.

A year previously ED had worried about surviving Wadsworth, 16 years her senior, without her “Right of Frost” (‘If I may have it – when it’s dead’, F431, Stanza 7, autumn 1862):

“Forgive me, if the Grave come slow –
Forgive me, if to stroke thy frost
Outvisions Paradise!
For Coveting to look at Thee –”.

I would like to know whether ED sent poems to Wadsworth, either in Philadelphia or San Francisco, but that we cannot know because he, like she, burned all correspondence at death. They covered their tracks well. The only thing we know for certain is what Wadworth’s youngest son, Dr. William S. Wadsworth, Coroner of Philadelphia, told ED’s early biographer, George F, Whicher, in a 1939 interview:

G. Whicher, “Did your father ever speak of Emily Dickinson’s poems?”

W. S. Wadsworth, “He would not have cared for them. The poetry he admired was of a different order. . . . My father was not one to be unduly impressed by a hysterical young woman’s ravings.”

Whicher, G. F. 1949. Pursuit of the Overtakeless. The Nation. Issue 2. Pp. 14-15.

Notice how Wadsworth’s son artfully dodges Whicher’s question. Sounds like a dutiful son guarding his father’s and his family’s reputation.

My “misquote” of ED stems from a sentence in her draft of Master Letter Franklin’s ML3 (Johnson’s ML2): “God made me- [Sir] Master-I did’nt be-myself. I dont know how it was done.” Based on handwriting, Franklin switched the numbers of JML 2 and 3. Sam Bowles could not have been “Master” because ED’s ML1 predates her first acquaintance with Bowles (Habegger 2001).

It is also unlikely that “Thee” is Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Three ED poems that are about Susan Gilbert Dickinson use uncapitalized pronouns referring to Sue eleven times and capitalized pronouns only twice:

Fr5, ‘One Sister have I in our house’, uses five uncapitalized and zero capitalized pronouns

Fr218, ‘You love me – you are sure –’ uses five uncapitalized and one capitalized pronouns, and

Fr269, ‘Wild Nights – Wild Nights!’ uses one uncapitalized and one capitalized pronouns.

In contrast, this poem, ‘I cannot live with You –’ uses capitalized “You” fourteen times. It also uses one capitalized “He” that clearly refers to God. Chances are this poem isn’t about Sue.

However, pronoun referents aside, the amazing comments on this poem and Adam DeGraff’s comments on many other poems (The Prowling Bee) reinforce the truism that the identity of “You” doesn’t matter. As a result of ED’s ambiguity, we can logically read her poems on a personal or transpersonal level.

For a full statement of my take on this topic, see this blog, ED-LarryB (https://ed-larryb.com/). The statement is on the right side of the screen below the list of “All Posts” of explicated ED poems.

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After commenting on Poems 1-763 (Franklin) on The Prowling Bee’, I am convinced that (virtually) all of Emily Dickinson’s (ED’s) poems have a factual historical level in addition to their various poetic levels of meaning. The reason for her instant and continuing public adulation (1890 - present) was and is, by far, poetic. She is one of the "Greats" that she always dreamed to be, despite her lifelong refusal to publish. That refusal freed her from criticism and allowed her to explore the outer boundaries of poetic power.

More than a century of scholarly research has resulted in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books and published academic papers about ED. A large majority of these publications focus only on the “poetic levels” of one or more of ED’s poems. Publications that consider both the “historic level” and “poetic levels” comprise a small minority. Publications that focus only on the factual history of her life probably number less than 100. (All numbers in this paragraph are my estimates.)

Unfortunately for ED’s universe of readers, these two basic levels (historical and poetic) cannot be separated into two ivory towers. Every history-level publication that I know of includes at least some discussion of the poetic level(s).

The reverse is not true. In fact, authors of the “poetry-level” school seem to avoid commenting on the historical level, sometimes admonishing that a poem must stand on its own, without concern for its historical roots. To my knowledge, there are (virtually) no published “history-level” books or articles that totally ignore ED’s poems and their poetic levels.

Of course, ED’s refusal to publish her poems was only possible because of lifelong financial and daily social/housekeeping support by her family, especially her father and sister, respectively. In addition, throughout her life, the Dickinsons hired servants, first Negro and later Irish, some of whom became much more than housekeepers for ED.

My point is that our appreciation of ED's poems can be enhanced by understanding both poetic and historical levels of her sound and sense. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore their historical base.