These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  Emily had another reason for paying attention to Ralph Waldo Emerson—a personal one. Recently, Emerson had dined and spent the night with Austin and Sue. Austin had organized an Amherst lecture series and brought to town an array of impressive visitors: senators, abolitionists, and literary men. Emerson is the “prince of lecturers,” the local newspaper proclaimed, days before his arrival. But after Emerson spoke, the room buzzed with disappointment. The problem with the lecture, some said, was it was too clear. “It was in the English language instead of the Emersonese in which he usually clothes his thoughts,” one had remarked.27 Sue did not have much of an opinion on the matter. That night she was far too excited about strolling home on Mr. Emerson’s “transcendental arm”—as she put it—than to focus on his clarity. During their walk across the town common, Emerson had spoken of Julia Ward Howe and encouraged Sue to read her collection of poetry, Passion Flowers. Once inside the Evergreens, he noticed another book he admired—Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel of the House.” He loved Patmore’s depiction of wives’ devotion to their husbands, a subject on which Sue no doubt had opinions. But Susan did not want to talk about other poets; she wanted to talk about Emerson. His poem “Brahma” had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. It was a meditation on existence and divinity that some readers thought subtle, others absurd, and a few pretentious. What is it about? Sue asked as the two sat near the fire. Is it a kind of Rosetta Stone? Emerson smiled. “Oh there was nothing to understand!” he replied. “How could they make so much fuss over it!” Sue must have been bewildered, perhaps even disheartened by the remark. She thought poetry should have a point, with language that adhered and coalesced toward a center—at least that’s what she had been discussing with Emily. Emily was not much help in explaining the mystery of Ralph Waldo Emerson.28 He seemed, she had said, to have “come from where dreams were born.”#

  Imagery was not the only challenge Emily faced in her new poem. Also on her mind was the large question Sue had raised with Emerson: what is a poem about? Emily questioned how explicit she should be in her poetry. Some of her earlier poems were straightforward, such as one she entitled “Snow flakes”: “I counted till they danced so / Their slippers leaped the town.”29 But it was her inclination to come at an idea not directly, but “slant,” she would call it.30 In the verse she was working on, the first stanza started clearly to establish the setting. While she never named exactly what she was talking about, Emily believed the final line left little doubt that she was describing a tomb.

  Safe in their alabaster chambers,

  Untouched by morning,

  And untouched by noon,

  Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,

  Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.

  Emily was deliberate in beginning the poem with the word “Safe.” It sounded reassuring—hopefully too much so. She wondered if the dead were as safe as clergy might suggest. Waiting for resurrection could take a while, the ironic “Safe” seemed to imply. Or resurrection might never come at all. In painting a scene of coffins and tombs, Emily offered no Christian comfort and no reward for a virtuous life. Also absent was the rigorous rectitude that Mary Lyon had preached. The most glaring absence in the first stanza was the omission of heaven itself. The life after death that Emily presented was a world of stasis, passivity and silence: a chamber where the meek members of the resurrection did not move.

  When it came to the second stanza, Emily wanted contrast. She wanted to present the natural world flitting above the dead, oblivious to those who slept below: the breeze laughs, the bee babbles, the birds pipe ignorant—even mocking—cadences. In the final line, Emily elected to be clear. She used a compact summation to declare what the poem meant. Yet there was more than summation in the last line—articulated not so much by what was said, but by what was not. The dead have simply perished, the last five words declare. They have not entered the kingdom of heaven. While the meek members may be sleeping—or “lying” as she later changed her mind to assert—they never would awaken. There was no resurrection in Emily’s poem—only perpetual internment.31

  Light laughs the breeze

  In her castle above them,

  Babbles the bee in a stolid ear,

  Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence:

  Ah! what sagacity perished here!

  Emily looked at the poem and deemed it ready—ready to show Sue. She sent the poem to the Evergreens via Pony Express.

  Sue was not the only one reading Emily’s new poems. Springfield Republican editor Samuel Bowles was as well. Sam had been the first dinner guest at the Evergreens after Sue and Austin married, and the three had become devoted friends.** Over the years, Bowles had shared with them his large cultural and political world. They met author Bret Harte, Thoreau’s friend Franklin Sanborn, and Harper’s Weekly editor George William Curtis. It was not uncommon for Bowles to pull a letter out of his pocket from an editor in London or relay conversations he had had with the president, cabinet members, abolitionists, or prominent literary women. He became a treasured friend of Emily’s, too, bringing her down to earth when she drifted too high into the ether, and serving as her interpreter of world events. When she hadn’t seen Sam for a while, Emily admitted she needed him to absorb the worst developments of the war. If Samuel Bowles delivered the news, she said “failure in a Battle – were easier.”32 An introspective man up to a point, Bowles was aware of his shortcomings. He could be diffuse, unable to focus, and incapable or unwilling to plumb depths. He was—a friend said—simply a pragmatic newspaperman through and through.33 One evening Sue and Austin had hosted for Henry Ward Beecher and others displayed the core of Sam’s character. After Beecher had commented on the beauty of a vase of flowers, he became pensive, and spoke of his childhood. I used to sit on the doorstep, he told the gathering, and listen to the wind in the branches. “I could hear the faint hum of the spinning wheel in the garret, and a tender sadness seemed to gather about me and melt my nature ’till I cried like a child.” What was it? he asked. What made me cry? Sue and the other guests were touched by his emotion and grew quiet. A visiting Episcopal bishop offered a tentative response: “It was doubtless, Beecher, a sense of the infinite pressing down upon your young soul.” Bowles was uneasy with the vulnerability he felt and shrugged. “You had probably been eating green apples, Beecher!!” he joked. The guests laughed and the poignancy of the moment evaporated.34 Bowles’s remark underscored that he was often uncomfortable with boring too deeply and sought to keep situations light. No one could be harder on Bowles than himself. He called himself “a suggestion, rather than a realization, & elusive & spasmodic & fragmentary: but no more to others than to myself.”35 He was right about his scattered ways, but Bowles was wrong about what he meant to others. For the past two years, Emily had been confiding in him and sending him poems.††

  Given their interests and affection for one another, Sue, Sam, and Emily formed a literary alliance. All three exchanged notes on poets and the latest news from the Atlantic Monthly.36 Sue let Sam know when the Republican published a poem she liked, and she clipped and saved verses from his newspaper.37 Bowles was not hesitant to publish women writers. After a young woman sent her work, he had responded with encouragement. “Though my ‘weakness’ is not poetry,” he had confessed, “I am . . . charmed with your little compact, thoughtful, mysterious & suggestive poems.”38 He also looked for more experienced literary women whose work had a grand sweep. When Julia Ward Howe wrote new lyrics to the battle hymn “John Brown’s Body,” Bowles lifted them from the Atlantic Monthly and reprinted them immediately in the Republican.‡‡ “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” the powerful verse began. While Bowles was open to publishing women, he also made clear that the Republican was not fond of what it labeled gloomy female writing. A Republican column spelled it out.39 “There is another kind of writing only too common, appealing to the sympathies of the reader without recommending itself to his subject. It may be called the
literature of misery,” he wrote. “The writers are chiefly women, gifted women may be, full of thought and feeling and fancy, but poor, lonely and unhappy. . . . The sketch or poem is usually the writer’s photograph in miniature. It reveals a countenance we would gladly brighten, but not by exposing it to the gaze of a worthless world.”40

  But Bowles had been exposing Emily’s verse to the world, and without her direct consent. Besides Emily’s valentine a decade earlier, the Republican had recently published two more of Emily’s poems. “Nobody knows this little rose,” had appeared in 1858, along with a headnote stating the newspaper had “surreptitiously” received it.41 In 1861, the Republican had printed “I taste a liquor never brewed.” Perhaps Sam was growing bolder or more confident in making Emily’s poems public, although all the verses appeared anonymously. Years later, Sue all but confessed to being the one who slipped Emily’s poems to Bowles. “Love turned to larceny,” she said.42

  Now when Sue looked at a draft of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers – ” she was tempted again. If she had concerns about what some might see as blasphemy in the poem’s view of the afterlife, she never said so. The poem impressed her, as did the lingering chill it produced. But before she made any decision about sending it to Sam, she wanted to talk with Emily. Sue didn’t entirely like the poem, though not because of its provocative view of death as eternal entombment. What gave her pause was the second stanza—the one about the bees and breeze. To Sue, it didn’t work. Emily went to work on the poem again. She sifted through the fascicles and all the loose sheets of poems. She knew she had several versions of the verse. All the alternate versions began with the same first stanza. But in version two, Emily experimented with a radically different ending. She hoped Sue would like the new second stanza. Emily placed the fascicle next to her on the small writing table, took up her pencil, copied the poem over, and sent it to the Evergreens. “Perhaps this verse would please you better – Sue,” she wrote.43 Compared to version one, version two was large, sweeping, more abstract, more like Beecher’s reverie on the infinite. Emily tried to put into practice what she was learning about imagery, and hoped the final image of the poem would register with Sue. But after Sue read the second version, she liked it less than the first. It was that second stanza again, or “verse” as Sue called it. While she thought Emily’s experiment with imagery was exceptional, she argued that its brilliance detracted from the poem as a whole. Stanzas should conform and blend together, she told Emily. Better to cut the second stanza altogether and that final wild image. She put her thoughts down in a note:

  I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse – It is remarkable as the chain lightening that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky but it does not go with the ghostly shimmer of the first verse as well as the other one – It just occurs to me that the first verse is complete in itself it needs no other, and can’t be coupled – Strange things always go alone – as there is only one Gabriel and one Sun—You never made a peer for that verse, and I guess you[r] kingdom does’nt hold one – I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again.44

  Sue wanted it cold. Emily put the second version aside, looked through her manuscripts again, and took Sue’s quip about no “peer for that verse” as a challenge. Her kingdom did indeed hold others, she thought to herself. Emily located a third version with a new second stanza, and off it went via Pony Express. “Is this frostier?” she asked.45

  Springs – shake the Sills –

  But – the Echoes – stiffen –

  Hoar – is the Window – and numb – the Door –

  Tribes of Eclipse – in Tents of Marble –

  Staples of Ages – have buckled – there –

  Emily also added a personal note. She thanked Sue for her advice and said how much it meant to her. Yet her words of gratitude were oddly crafted—issued in a lurching cadence and as slant as her metaphors. It was unclear why Emily was so indirect in expressing appreciation. Her note seemed to reassure herself that Sue’s suggestions were worth taking. The only phrase in the entire note that didn’t stammer came at the end. In the years since admitting she wanted to be distinguished, Emily’s dream had only grown stronger.

  Dear Sue –

  Your praise is good – to me – because I know it knows – and suppose – it means –

  Could I make you and Austin – proud – sometime – a great way off – ’twould give me taller feet – 46

  No additional versions of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” passed between the houses. Emily was at work on other poems, and—as usual—tinkering and adding edits to ones she had already written. The harsh winter lingered. Professor Snell had measured waist-high drifts in the woods around Amherst.47 Avalanches of ice had demolished chimneys at the college and damaged Mr. Kellogg’s store. One frozen slide near the center of town almost knocked passersby to their knees.48 Then there was the fire that rattled everyone. All Rodolphus Hubbard had wanted to do was support the troops. He’d climbed up to his attic, hoisted the American flag, and set off burning powder to cheer the Union victory at Fort Donelson. But before he knew it, the powder ignited the ceiling and then the floor and soon the entire attic was engulfed. Emily could smell smoke from her window. Lucky for Hubbard, help arrived and his house was saved—but not before there was considerable destruction. Furniture and floors were charred, and Hubbard’s pride took a beating. He was so embarrassed he took out an advertisement in the Amherst newspaper and apologized for all the commotion. “We had run up the stars and stripes from the roof of the house, and by burning powder, were doing what we could to testify our joy in view of the triumph of the arms of the Nation,” he wrote. “But it was not part of our programme to burn the house.”49

  Given the march of the Burnside Expedition, cascading ice, and fire in Mr. Hubbard’s attic, people in Amherst had reason to feel anxious. But that Saturday, March 1, something else startled Emily. Sam Bowles had published “Safe in their alabaster chambers” in his newspaper.§§ It was the version that Sue least disliked—the one with the second stanza about the breeze and the bees. Before Emily could say a word, Sue dashed off a preemptory note promising they would talk as soon as she could. “Emily—All’s well,” she wrote. Susan had her hands full again. The maid was out and she could not leave little Ned alone.¶¶ “There are two or three little things I wanted to talk with you about without witnesses,” she continued. “Has girl read Republican? It takes as long to start our Fleet as the Burnside.”50

  Our Fleet? What did Sue mean? Sue suggested she had a hand in the poem—if not in writing and editing, then in securing publication. Did Sue mean to imply that Emily wanted “Safe in their alabaster chambers” printed in the Republican? And why did she complain about it taking so long for the poem to appear—comparing its launch to General Burnside’s expedition? There was no doubt that Sue was delighted Emily’s poem had been published, nettle-some second stanza and all. But did Emily feel that way?

  She did not say. As usual—when it came to publication, Emily said nothing. With all the versions of her alabaster poem before her, Emily knew which one she preferred. She disagreed with Sue. Emily liked version two—the one with the experimental imagery. The second stanza read as if the poet were standing at the edge of the universe and looking back at Earth. From that perspective, all of humankind, all of history, all of the world’s eminence and strife looked insignificant. The planet was nothing more than a molecule and the dead merely atoms. It was the final image that encompassed everything Dickinson was coming to understand. It was an image evoking Emerson’s “terrible simplicity”—abstract and astonishing—and as cold as ice.51

  Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,

  Untouched by morning –

  And untouched by noon –

  Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –

  Rafter of satin – and Roof of stone –

  Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –