Emily Dickinson's Poetry

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In this beautiful litany of loss, the best-known of Dickinson’s poems, the speaker moves through a series of states of being with her loved, finding each one barred to her. Since she cannot live, die, be resurrected, be judged by God, lost or saved with him, they “must meet apart”, in a place paradoxically defined as minuscule and vast, and nurtured by “that White sustenance-/despair. In each hypothetical meeting, rejected vision of meeting the speaker unflinchingly juxtaposes the intensity of their love with the limiting reality confronting them.
In the first stanza, the poet rules out the possibility of actually living with her beloved on the grounds that “It would be life”-/And life is over there-/Behind the Shelf”. Read in isolation, the
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