This article explores Emily Dickinson’s poetic exploration of unattainable desire and its interplay with absence and death, seen through melancholic imaginings. Despite the absence of love with her beloved, Dickinson’s speaker imagines it as once possessed and then lost, thereby rendering attainable something previously unreachable. Through analysis of poems like “I cannot live with You,” “I see thee better—in the Dark,” “If I may have it, when it’s dead,” and “Title divine—is mine!,” this article reveals that death in Dickinson, often depicted as the ultimate form of loss, serves as a crucial backdrop upon which desire unfolds, perceived as an essential element for its fulfillment. Yet the speaker’s idealized love, when realized, is susceptible to disappointment. Caught in the conflict between imaginative longing and the necessary disappointment of its realization, the speaker employs various melancholic strategies to sustain desire, such as delaying its fulfillment, envisioning its object as lost in the past or the future, and idealizing the object of her longing.
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