Emily Dickinson was one of the most famous American poetry writers in history. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830, and is the middle child of three siblings. Emily Dickinson was born into a middle class family and was well-educated. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, a town official, and a treasurer of Amherst College. They had a house in the town of Amherst, which was known as “The Homestead,” which was built by her grandfather in 1813. She attended college for a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, studying a variety of subjects from Latin to English literature. However, her father had taken her out of college due to a developed illness.
As a young girl, Dickinson’s father tried to refrain her from reading books that would sway her belief in religion. She and her family attended church regularly, and her parents would raise her to be a Christian woman. However, Emily Dickinson refused to “think badly of ‘the world,’ or believe that greater pleasures could be found in heaven than on earth.” Additionally, her letters expressed, “heaven was embodied in familiar surroundings in nature, in love, and in the power of thought”.
Emily Dickinson’s early letters were written at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Her poems expressed a “witty, startling, irreverent imagination, and a passion for situations which combined friendship, honesty, secrecy, and private jokes, and talk about books and ideas”. Dickinson’s poems were original in style, spoken from the heart with strong emotions.
One of Emily Dickinson’s famous love poems, “I cannot live with you,” expresses a variety of reasons of why they are unable to live a life together. In the first three stanzas of her poem, she puts an emphasis on the word life. She strongly uses the word “life” because life is full of rules and complications that keep us from expressing our freedom and creativity. She expresses that if they wanted to be together in life, they would have to surrender their passion of expression, which would defeat the purpose of life.
Furthermore, in the second stanza, a Father is defined as, “an officer of a church who is responsible for the care and upkeep of church property and sometimes for ringing bells and digging graves,” dictionary.com She expresses a Father as a criminal because he maintains a strong value in religion, by keeping her away from the man she loves by being devoted to God. At the end of the second stanza to the beginning of the third stanza, she compares the porcelain cup to her delicate heart. Emily Dickinson expresses the cup as being broken, which means that she could also end up feeling hurt when her heart is shattered. The cup, made out of porcelain, is compared to love because of the one similarity they share, which is beauty. She expresses that her heart is fragile, but love is one of the greatest feelings in life shared between two people.
Continuing to the fourth and fifth stanzas, Emily Dickinson expresses that dying together would be impossible to accomplish. When Dickinson says, “I could not die-with You-For One must wait,” (pg. 1307, Dickinson), she explains that one has to wait to die, while their significant other has passed away. In the same stanza, Dickinson says, “To shut the Other’s Gaze down, You-could-Not,” expressing that when it is her time to die, the one she loves would not be there to wait for her. Alternatively, a message is conveyed that once the person they have loved has died, they believe that there is no purpose to live any longer.
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