Adler found Composition with Still Life especially difficult to provide a psychological interpretation of, but thought it suggested "a picture of journey's end or of the last harbor." He observed that the presentation of objects and figures "—empty, abandoned, useless, dropped—conveys a sense of impotence, frigidity, or death." Mitchell Kahan recognized in this work, as in other paintings by Dickinson, "an iconography of concealment," created by showing only parts of things, blurring boundaries, and obscuring relationships. He perceived the effect to be "a haunting sense of loss," the paradoxical product of "Dickinson's incessant gaze and prolonged study of form," and in this work combined with a sense of decapitation and death. Driscoll recognizes water symbolism suggestive of disaster and death at sea in the imagery and relates it to shipwrecks that occurred in Provincetown, some of which he witnessed. Ward points out that the title that Dickinson gave the painting, as well as its original name, Figures and Still Life seem to reflect his determination to discourage interpretation. He suggests, however, that he must have become aware of the effect of the imagery as the painting developed and that it is perhaps significant that in 1945, expressing dissatisfaction with the picture's title, he wrote to Esther, ""I . . . think I should call it 'The Flying Dutchman,'" the name of the legendary ship doomed to sail forever with its crew of dead men, despite the fact that the imagery does not support that specific subject. Ward agrees with other writers about the strong sense of death created by the headless figures, the denuded trees, the horizontal vases, the ruined steps and railing descending into darkness, the spiral object, used to circulate water, but lying useless, and a form suggesting a broken bone in the right foreground. He compares the picture's entrance, leading into the dark void below, to the entrance in The Glen (Andrée's Balloon) It is comparable as well to the area of darkness in the foreground of Stranded Brig, which Dickinson called "a deep chasm," and the entrance to Inland Lake, although here not into, but over, a dark void. Ward suggests that Composition with Still Life is the Dickinson work most explicitly presented as a dream through the combination of solid, detailed forms with passages that melt into gaseous substances or dissolve into one another. He observes that this is the first of the large pictures