And the next one I want to look at
is another, which begins with the impossibility of love.
Because life with true love is simply too intense,
whereas most lives are ordinary, ordered, and contained.
"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 others 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 shown closer by.
They 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.
And were you lost, I would be.
Though my name rang loudest on the heavenly fame.
And were you saved and I condemn 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 despair.
The dance here intricate.
But able to be followed.
Moves from I cannot live with you to I could not die with
you.
I could not go to heaven with you.
I could not bear you in hell and I in heaven.
I could not bear you in heaven and I in hell.
So we must not love.
And we are left to be lost, to despair.
Even though the only space between us
is just that space in which the door is somewhat ajar.
But how far is that?
It is oceans.
It is prayer.
It is despair, not death but a life sentence, which
even becomes a sustenance.
Here the emptiness is dark yet white at the same time.
Pain is pleasure.
Separation is the only love that is bearable.
And that perhaps only barely.
Poem is a powerful expression of love so intense
it shuts out everything else, including God."
It is painful.
It is excellent.
It is saturating.
It has everything we've talked about in every poem,
images like dinner service in the cupboard,
saturation of sight, bells ringing in heaven,
and wide and white oceans.
It has the ongoing music like the rising
tones in the first stanza.
Keying the poem with the kind of bursting energy
and the separation frequently of the you from the I
through ruptures and rhythmic devices and the nearly
ecstatic stanza 3 from the end.
The one of saturation in the lovers look and being.
And look at the isolation of the eye in the last stanza
always finally alone.
And the set off of the final word of the poem.
Music in Dickinson always has to do
with emotion and with meaning and not
so much to do with prescribed patterns other than
to set them up so as to break them.
She is, I think, the most courageous poet
of the 19th century, which makes her
an apt prefigure for the 20th century
as she has been found to be by many poets of the last 70
years.
And I cannot live with you love cuts her off from God.
And it is finally her dance with the infinite.
With God or with the possibility of God and the infinite that
we will be concerned.