It sifts from leaden sieves...

(analysis)

Emily Dickinson’s poem “It sifts from leaden sieves” is a tour de force of assonance, alliteration,
consonance, varieties of metaphor, denotation and connotation. That description –wide-ranging as it
is- fails to include all of the poet’s masterly blending of poetic devices, but offers points for
commentary.

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. One hears assonance is line one’s “sifts” and “sieves.”
The sound returns also in the quatrain’s “fills” and “wrinkles” and later in "stills . . .artisans.” There
is also closeness in the vowel sounds of “wood” and “wool,” the first of those words forming a slant
rime with the stanza’s concluding word “road.”

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds of nearby words such as “sifts” and
“sieves,” “wool” and “wood,” “wrinkles” and “road.” The term can also apply to words lacking a
beginning consonant, like the keyword “It,” which begins eight of the poem’s twenty lines along
with two interior appearances in lines 10 and 19. Other noteworthy alliterations blended with
assonance include “forehead from,” “wraps . . . rail . . .rail,” "stump . . . stack . . . stem . . summer’s
. . . stills,” “ruffles . . .wrists.”

Consonance

Consonance is similar to assonance but the repeated sounds are interior consonants. The f and v
sounds of “sifts” and “sieves” are nearly consonantal. The l’s of “all . . .fills . . . alabaster . . .
wool . . . wrinkles" apply, as do the sts’s of “wrists . . .posts . . .ghosts.”

Varieties of metaphor

Metaphors are figures of speech in which a literal thing is associated with a figurative thing as in
“My love is a rose.” That would be a type one metaphor since the literal object and figurative object
are named. The second form is one wherein the literal object is named and the figuratve is implied.
In Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” a tree is said to “wear/ A nest of robins in her hair.” The tree is being
compared to an implied girl or woman. In the third form the literal object is implied and the
figurative one stated. All of the “It”s in this poem imply

snow. The fourth form is one in which both aspects of the metaphor are implied. In Dickinson’s
poem “I like to see it lap the miles,” a train is the “it,” and it is compared to an implied house cat.

Denotation and connotation

The denotation of a word is its dictionary definition. The connotations are overtones which a word
has picked up. House is denotative of a structure in which someone lives or something is kept out of
the weather. Home has the same denotation plus connotations of warmth, comfort, family, and
security.

In this poem’s title and first line, the word “leaden” denotes made of lead. However, we know that
the sieves of Dickinson’s time used to sift flour were made of tin. The word leaden has connotations
of darkness, heaviness, and thus oppression and describes the skies of a snowy winter day.
On the contrary, the snowflakes are beautifying. They “powder” the wood as a woman powders her
face. The color and consistency of frost are imported through the adjective “alabaster” -lending
suggestions of beauty and value-that modifies “wool” and conceals the facial “wrinkles” of the
rutted road.

The face powder metaphor continues through stanza two:

It makes an even face

Of mountain and of plain –

Unbroken forehead from the east

Unto the east again.

Assonantal harmonies create delight-filled music with the repeated sounds of “makes . . face . . .
mountain . . . plain . . . again.”

From makeup application the poem moves to ladies’ clothing to describe the beautification of the
snowfall. Stanza 1’s white fabric of “alabaster wool” is recalled by “wraps . . .fleeces . . . celestial
veil . . .ruffles wrists of posts / As ankles of a queen. . . . .”

In stanza four an additional metaphor is created – that of a room now empty but earlier inhabited by
“Acres of joints where harvests were. . . .”

Experienced readers of poetry are asked to forgive the prior discussion of figurative language that
was intended instructively for the inexperienced. They should instead enjoy and wonder at the ease
and mastery of Dickinson’s snowflakes personified as ghostly artisans who beautify and disappear.
I cannot live without you (analysis)

A Close Reading of "I Cannot Live With You"

"I Cannot Live With You" is one of Emily Dickinson’s great love poems, close in form to the poetic
argument of a classic Shakespearean sonnet.¹ The poem shares the logical sensibility of the
metaphysical poets whom she admired, advancing her thoughts about her lover, slowly, from the
first declaration to the inevitable devastating conclusion. However, unlike most sonnet arguments or
"carpe diem" poems, this poem seems designed to argue against love. The poem can be broken
down into five parts. The first explains why she cannot live with her love object, the second why
she cannot die with him, the third why she cannot rise with him, the fourth why she cannot fall with
him, and the final utterance of impossibility. The poem begins with a sense of impossibility:

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 –

Moving from the abstraction of the first four lines, the second and third stanzas enter into the
domestic metaphor of china, which is described variously as discarded, broken, quaint, and cracked,
put up on the shelf and forgotten. If life is "behind the shelf," it is completely outside the experience
of the china, as is the speaker’s life. The power of the first line is temporarily muted, and the reader
is similarly trapped inside a haunting verse of cups and shelves, eerie in their quietness. That the
china is locked away by the Sexton, a representative of the official or practical face of religiosity,
seems to imply that it is not only the domestic sphere that the speaker is trapped in, but also the
binds of the church, or at least the administrative daily function of the church, which Dickinson
viewed as being quite separate from the passion behind it.

The lines themselves alternate between long and short, and the disparity between the lines becomes
more dramatic in the second and third stanzas. The delicate, halting, "cracked" lines that describe
the china seem physically overwhelmed by the lines about the housewife or Sexton. Between the
second and third stanzas, the enjambment (pausing on "cup") compounded with the dash, which
emphasizes the pause and line break, allows life to be hopefully like a "cup" for the fraction of a
second it takes the reader to make it to the next line, where it is discarded "of the housewife." This
line reads as both "The housewife discards the cup" and also "the Sexton puts away the cup
discarded by the housewife," as if what is not good enough for marriage is good enough for the
church. "Quaint," incidentally, is a word that Dickinson used to describe herself in letters, when
writing about her reclusiveness; "half-cracked" is a word that T. H. Higginson, her poetic
correspondent, used to describe her.
In the second part of the poem, Dickinson imagines that the alternative to living with someone is
dying with them, but that also has been denied to her:

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?

These stanzas express not only the fact that if she cannot live with her love she is dead, but also that
the "with" is taken from her—she can die, but not with him because death is necessarily a private
act. First she argues that she must wait to "shut the Other’s Gaze down," which might literally mean
to close his eyes, but also the word "Gaze" implies that there is something sustaining about the act
of looking upon another with love; it is that which creates life, and it must be actively shut down for
death to occur. She imagines that he would not be strong enough to do that for her. Her second
argument within this section is that, upon his death, denied the "Right of Frost," she would long for
death.

In the third section of the poem, Dickinson imagines the final judgment, and how it might be
overwhelmed by her earthly love:

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 not more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

She is unable to see or experience paradise because she is so consumed with her vision of him—not
only does his face "put out" the face of Jesus like a candle, but he "saturated her sight" so much in
life that she is unable to "see" paradise, meaning, perhaps that he distracted her from piety. The
speaker’s experience in this poem is deeply linked to sight, and suggests that that which cannot be
seen cannot be experienced. In the stanza beginning "They’d judge us," there is a complete
breakdown of rhyme; when she writes "I could not" she does not rhyme, and the faltering echoes
the broken fragility of the first lines. The pairing of "sordid excellence" is both a metaphysical
touch, and a characteristic Dickinson moment of transforming an abstraction into its opposite with
an oddly chosen adjective.

In the fourth section of the poem, the speaker describes why she cannot be in hell with her lover:

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 –

Just as she cannot see heaven because his face obscures her view, her perspective of hell is confined
to being without him. If she were saved and he were lost, then she would be in hell without him,
and if they were both saved, but saved apart, then that would also be hell. In admirable pursuit of
the conclusion of this radical argument, which has grown ever more impossible as she chases it, she
passionately refuses to believe that there is an alternative where they are both saved together or both
condemned.

The final stanza acts structurally like the final couplet of a sonnet, finishing the argument, but
leaving a question for the reader to consider:

So We must meet apart –

You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –

In the line "You there – I – here" we can see a perfect example of how the poet's dashes work to
hold the words, and ideas, of "you" and "I" apart.

As in a sonnet, the rhyme scheme tightens up quite a bit in this final section. Dickinson internally
rhymes "are" with "ajar," half-rhyming "apart" and "ajar," "despair" with "there," "here" and
"prayer," then closing up the stanza in rhyme. It is as if she intends the final rhyme to show the
perfection of her argument in the poem's conclusion. Additionally, those four words that she rhymes
quite eloquently express the problem itself, with prayer standing in for its close synonym, hope. The
intricacy of the rhyme leaves "sustenance" as unrhymed, underscoring that "White Sustenance"
does not nourish. Incidentally, early publications of the poem replaced "white" with "pale" as if
softening the conclusion that she reaches by modifying the degree of her language; pale sustenance
seems somehow more sustaining.

However, even as she closes the argument, it opens up a little, because in this despair she has found
a kind of sustenance, however undernourishing it is. There is something holy about this kind of
despair, and "white" seems also to be "heavenly," as if in losing her hope for the afterlife, she has
found a new earthly devotion to replace it, and then elevated it to celestial levels. This stanza is
notably the first time she uses the word "we," capitalized for emphasis, and creates a paradox where
"meet apart" seems possible, or at least more possible than any of the other alternatives she has
rejected throughout the poem. She claims that the door is just "ajar" but then compares it to oceans,
making "ajar" as wide open as the earth itself, and then linking it to prayer, or hope. In this
amazingly deft bit of wordplay, Dickinson reverses everything as she’s saying it—the lovers are
apart but meeting; the door is ajar, like an ocean; and the speaker is somehow sustained by despair.
In a final touch, she ends the poem with an elongated endstop, printed as a dash, and whether it is
meant to be "ajar" or more definitively shut is as unanswerable as the final question of the poem.

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¹ A Shakespearean sonnet typically uses the three quatrains to develop an argument about love,
adding a new logical point in each. While poems are not typically thought of as arguments, the
Renaissance tradition demanded rigorous logic and quality of thought rather than simple
sentimentality—even when writing about love. For example, in a "Carpe Diem" poem, the poet is
trying to find inventive ways to convince a virgin to "make much of time." Other arguments might
be why love lasts beyond death, why a comparison to a summer’s day is a complete failure, or why
the poet's love is greater than any other previous love.