Emily Dickinson: Two Poems

▪ Primary Source

       Emily Dickinson is widely acclaimed as one of America's greatest poets. Though she wrote nearly 2,000 poems, only 7 were printed during her lifetime, and those without her consent. Her poetic genius flowered during the Civil War; in 1862 alone, she produced some 360 poems. But she refused any publicity after a critic and friend, Thomas Higginson, advised her against publishing her works. "Publication," she wrote, "is the auction of the mind." As one of her poems puts it: "How dreary to be somebody! / How public, like a frog, / To tell your name the livelong day / To an admiring bog!" The following two poems were written in 1862.

      The sources of these poems are Poems, Mabel L. Todd and T.W. Higginson, eds., 1890, and Poems, T.W. Higginson and Mabel L. Todd, eds., 2nd series, 1891.

I CANNOT LIVE WITH YOU

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 broken;

A newer Sèvres 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

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 keep apart,

You there, I here,

With just the door ajar

That oceans are,

And prayer,

And that pale sustenance,

Despair!

I LIKE TO SEE IT LAP THE MILES

I like to see it lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,

And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop — docile and omnipotent —

At its own stable door.

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