This poem has been praised as her best love poem and may well be her most famous

love poem. In this

heavily ironic poem, the final expression and measure of the intensity of her love is her despair at the lovers
having to remain apart.

The poem is organized by the various lives they can't share: they can't live together in this world; they can't die
together; they can't rise after death together; they can't be judged by God together, whether destined for heaven
or not. All they can do is maintain the possibility of communication (the partially open door), though "oceans"
apart. Prayer or God offers no comfort or hope; all they have is the "pale sustenance" (not a nourishing food),
which is despair.
“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.”

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” 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...

"I cannot live with You", by Emily Dickinson, is an emotional poem in which she
shares her experiences and thoughts on death and love. Some critics believe that she
has written about her struggle with death and her desire to have a relationship with a
man whose vocation was ministerial, Reverend Charles Wadsworth. She considers
suicide as an option for relieving the pain she endures, but decides against it. The
narrator, more than likely Emily herself, realizes that death will leave her even
further away from the one that she loves. There is a possibility that they will never
be together again.

"Arguing with herself, Dickinson considers three major resolutions for the
frustrations she is seeking to define and to resolve. Each of these resolutions is
expressed in negative form: living wither her lover, dying with him, and
discovering a world beyond nature. Building on this series of negations, Dickinson
advances a catalogue of reasons for her covenant with despair, which are both final
and insufficient. Throughout, she excoriates the social and religious authorities that
impede her union, but she remains emotionally unconvinced that she has correctly
identified her antagonists." (Pollack, 182)

Dickinson begins her poem by saying that she cannot live with her lover because
their life together is an object that can only be opened with a key. The Sexton, or
church officer in charge of the maintenance of church property, keeps the key. The
reverends involvement with God and with a woman at the same time is like a
porcelain cup that is easily broken. This is an example of Personification. Life is
personified as this old cup which is valuable until a new, better one is available.

Sensory images are used to develop an interest for the reader and a way of showing
what the author felt. An example is in the fifth stanza, "And see YoufreezeWithout
my Right of Frost". The sense of touch is used when she says that one who is dead
is frozen.