I cannot live with You Summary & Analysis
by Emily Dickinson

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"I cannot live with You" is one of American poet Emily Dickinson's longest poems—and perhaps one of her most tormented. The poem's speaker tells a beloved that they "cannot live" together, not because their love is insufficient, but because it's overpowering. The thought of sitting beside this beloved's death bed (or worse, being separated from them in the afterlife) is simply too much for the speaker to bear; they'd rather endure the "Despair" of parting now than face those trials later. Like most of Dickinson's poems, this one wasn't discovered until after her death. It was first printed in the posthumous collection Poems (1890).

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