¶ Dickinson scholar James R. Guthrie believes the poet’s eye problems may have begun as early as 1851. He cites a Boston visit Dickinson made that year to consult Dr. William Wesselhoft. [James R. Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 178.]
# Emily did have a photograph, a daguerreotype taken around the time she was a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Perhaps she did not offer it because she was so much younger in the image. She was thirty-one in 1862 when writing her initial letters to Higginson.
** When Lincoln initiated the military draft in 1864, thirty-five-year-old Austin Dickinson, like other men of financial means, bought a substitute to serve in his place. Paying a substitute between $300 and $500 was legal and not entirely uncommon. The amount of money was based on an unskilled laborer’s yearly income. Many men looked upon paying a substitute as shirking one’s duty and labeled the Civil War a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” [Wayne E. Phaneuf and Joseph Carvalho III, A Not So Civil War: Western Massachusetts at Home and in Battle, vol. 1 (Springfield, MA: The Republican, 2015), 131; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 88 and 89.]
†† It is often believed Robert Gould Shaw commanded the first regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War. Shaw commanded the Massachusetts 54th, but he was not the first to lead a black regiment. Shaw’s regiment mustered in 1863 and Higginson’s in 1862.
‡‡ Higginson wrote many letters to newspapers, criticizing the federal government on pay inequity for black soldiers. His letters appeared in the New York Evening Post, New-York Daily Tribune, and the New York Times. Black soldiers received $10 a month with a deduction of $3 for clothing. [Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journals and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 55, 61; Wayne E. Phaneuf and Joseph Carvalho III, A Not So Civil War: Western Massachusetts at Home and in Battle, vol. 1 (Springfield, MA: The Republican, 2015), 130.]
§§ Alcott seemed to want to get away from Concord as much as anything. “Don’t you want a cook, [or] nurse,” she wrote Higginson. “I am willing to enlist in any capacity . . . to be busied in some more loyal labor than sitting quietly at home spinning fictions when such fine facts are waiting for all of us to profit by & celebrate.” She did not make the journey to South Carolina. [Looby, 318]
¶¶ Major Hunt died in the Brooklyn Naval Yard while testing a new submarine battery. A shell exploded and gas overwhelmed him. He fell into the submarine’s hold and died of a fatal brain concussion. Edward Bissell Hunt was forty-one. [Leyda, vol. 2, 82–83.]
## Patients such as Emily who could afford good medical care were not usually treated in a hospital. Instead they moved into hotels or boardinghouses near a physician in order to be treated. [Martin Wand and Richard B. Sewall, “‘Eyes Be Blind Heart Be Still’: A New Perspective on Emily Dickinson’s Eye Problem,” New England Quarterly 52, no. 3, September 1979, 400–406.]
*** Other Drum Beat issues included the works of Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Cullen Bryant. Dickinson’s verse was published anonymously, as was all her work that spring. Even though Drum Beat contributors received complimentary copies of the newspaper, Alcott and others would not have known the author of the sunset poem. But Richard Salters Storrs may have. Storrs was Austin and Susan’s old friend and an Amherst College trustee. He edited the Drum Beat and would have encountered Emily’s verse through Samuel Bowles.
††† One of the editors of the Round Table was Henry Sweetser, Emily’s first cousin. His coeditor—his cousin Charles—was a Dickinson neighbor who worked for a time at the Republican. Even the Brooklyn Daily Union had an Amherst connection. Gordon Ford, husband of Emily’s girlhood friend Emily Fowler Ford, was one of the newspaper’s founders.
‡‡‡ Emily moved to an area of Cambridge one mile east of Harvard College referred to as Cambridgeport. The two names were used interchangeably. The boardinghouse stood near what is now Central Square on Bishop Richard Allen Drive. [Hiroko Uno, Emily Dickinson Visits Boston (Kyoto, Japan: Yamaguchi Publishing House, 1990) 58.]
§§§ On April 28, 1863, the US War Department issued a call for wounded men to serve in the Invalid Corps, later called the Veteran Reserve Corps. The call sought former Union troops who had lost arms or legs or were otherwise injured to reenlist for light duty, including work as pickets.
¶¶¶ Charlotte Forten [Grimke]’s essay “Life on the Sea Island” appeared in the May 1864 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and detailed her work as an African American teacher in what became known as the Port Royal Experiment.
### Dickinson’s handwriting from this era is strikingly different compared to earlier years. Thomas H. Johnson, editor of the first complete edition of Dickinson’s poems, observed that the poet’s handwriting showed significant “change in appearance: letters elongated and uneven. . . . Strongly slanted. Tendency toward separation of letters, a few words of four of five letters being entirely unligated. Some capitals, such as A and C exaggerated in size.” [Thomas H. Johnson, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), liv.] In this early June 1864 letter to Higginson, Dickinson’s handwriting is noticeably larger—some lines include two or three words at most. See https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:kh04mv993/.
**** There is no definitive diagnosis for Emily Dickinson’s eye problems. Theories have included exotropia (or strabismus), lupus erythematous, iritis/uveitis, and a kind of psychosomatic blindness. I favor the iritis diagnosis, with the possibility of exotropia as well. Iritis is an inflammation of the muscles of the eye. With exotropia, the eyes turn outward. Interviews I conducted with descendants of Dickinson’s Norcross relatives indicated exotropia ran in the family and has been present for generations. My descriptions of Dickinson’s likely treatment for iritis derive from comments in the poet’s letters, Dr. Williams’s written protocols for addressing the disease, and medical texts from the nineteenth century. [Polly Longsworth and Norbert Hirschhorn, “‘Medicine Posthumous’: A New Look at Emily Dickinson’s Medical Conditions,” New England Quarterly 69, no. 2, June 1996, 299–316; Martha Ackmann, “ ‘I’m Glad I Finally Surfaced’: A Norcross Descendent Remembers Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson Journal 5, no. 2, Fall 1996, 120–26.]
†††† Alfred Habegger contends Dickinson continued to write while being treated for eye disease in 1864. He believes she brought her penciled rough drafts home to Amherst and in 1865 copied many over in ink. [Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 489.]
‡‡‡‡ Recent medical studies have confirmed that the loss of sight does enhance other senses as well as bolster memory and language use. A 2017 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary discovered that the “brain ‘rewires’ itself to enhance other senses in blind people . . . [that enhancement] is possible through the process of neuroplasticity or ability of brains to naturally adapt to our experiences.” [Public Release, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, March 22, 2017.] It is reasonable to assume that Dickinson, suffering from diminishment of her eyesight, may have experienced a degree of such enhancements herself.
§§§§ Louisa Norcross was twenty-two at the time she lived in Mrs. Bangs’s Boarding House, and her sister Frances was sixteen. Emily Dickinson was thirty-three.
¶¶¶¶ The Springfield Republican ran the complete text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in its November 20, 1863, edition. The newspaper praised Lincoln’s speech, declaring, “His little speech is a perfect gem; deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma. Then it has the merit of unexpectedness in its verbal perfection and beauty.” Surely the praise for Lincoln’s address would have resonated with Dickinson. [Walter L. Powell, “‘So Clear of Victory’: Emily Dickinson’s Ge
ttysburg Address.” November 9, 2013, Lecture at the Amherst History Museum, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum.]
#### Images of eyes, seeing, and sight became one of Dickinson’s most frequently used tropes. Their frequency is her poetic lexicon—over three-hundred references—is topped only by pronouns and words such as “day,” “know,” “away,” “more,” “sun,” “life,” and “never.” [“Index Words in Order of Frequency,” in A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 865.]
Eight
YOU WERE NOT AWARE THAT YOU SAVED MY LIFE
Tuesday, August 16, 1870 2 p.m. Thermometer 76 degrees, clouds 1 cumulous, Winds W 2, Therm Attached to Barometer 66.5, Dry Bulb 76.0, Wet Bulb 62,557.9. Humidity 43%, Remarks: Smoky.
—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College
Although Emily knew she should lessen the strain on her eyes by not reading, she simply could not help herself. After she arrived home from medical treatment in Boston, she grabbed the family’s volume of Shakespeare and looked for a place to hide. Her bedroom—private as it was—was too open to intrusion: too many raps on the door, too many calls from the kitchen to help chop chicken or bang spice for cakes. She wanted to be left alone and she wanted to raise her voice. Up on the second floor, she opened a door near the front of the house that hardly anyone ever used and climbed steep stairs to the attic. The attic was cavernous, running nearly the full expanse of the house and crowned with towering, roughhewn beams. On either side, two rounded windows cast faint pools of light. Another set of narrow steps led from the attic to the cupola, but Emily decided to stay put. She knew the views from the top were beautiful, but she needed more space than the small cupola offered. Less light too. She wanted to follow doctor’s orders and not endanger her eyes. The attic was perfect for her purpose. She opened her Shakespeare to 2 Henry VI and ripped through pages until she found the passage. “I thought I should tear the leaves out as I turned them,” she said.1 She hungered for words after months of being forbidden to read or even use a pen. She wanted to experience their full force—out loud and dramatically proclaimed. It was no accident that she sought this austere place for her performance. The words—and nothing else—were all that mattered. Then she let loose. “‘Let me hear from thee,’ her voice rang out. ‘For whereso’er thou art in this world’s Globe / I’ll have an Iris that shall find thee out.’”2 No one found her out, alone in the attic—a would-be Shakespearean actress performing for an audience of spiders and stumbling flies. That was just what she wanted.
Emily’s garret performances did not continue. Within weeks of coming home, Emily realized she would need to return to Boston for additional medical attention. Frustrated and impatient, Vinnie simply could not understand why Emily did not get well. In April 1865—only four months after she had returned from her initial treatments—Emily again was back in the boardinghouse, living with her cousins, and under the physician’s care. “The Doctor says it must heal while warm Weather lasts, or it will be more troublesome,” she wrote home.3 Emily longed for the kind of solitude she’d sought in the family attic, but she would not find it in the city, and certainly not during that tumultuous spring. At almost the very moment she arrived at the boardinghouse for a second time, word came of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. The terrible war was over. Years of battle had devastated the country and left no one untouched, not even in bucolic Amherst. Seventy-five Amherst homes mourned loved ones who had been killed, wounded, captured, or were still missing.4 Celebrations of the war’s end were everywhere across Massachusetts. Parades marched up and down Cambridge streets, the Boston telegraph clattered so incessantly, newspapers could barely keep up, and Emily’s boardinghouse buzzed with elated conversation. But a week later, Abraham Lincoln was dead, murdered by a Confederate sympathizer. The shock of Lincoln’s assassination was so profound, people did not know what to say or do. For want of something more solemn than a nod, Cambridge men saluted one another. The day of Lincoln’s funeral, citizens gathered at City Hall around the corner from Emily’s boardinghouse. After somber speeches, people sat frozen in their seats, as if moving would unleash another nightmare. But it was the sound of the city that people remembered most. One person said Cambridge felt like “one mighty ocean of sound . . . rolling through space like a deep sob of anguish.”5 Emily must have found the city’s grief deafening, and it intensified her own worry. She was concerned about Sue, whose sister, Harriet Gilbert Cutler, had died unexpectedly, leaving a husband and young children. Of Sue’s three sisters, now only Mattie remained. “I would have drowned twice to save you sinking, dear,” she wrote. “If I could only have covered your Eyes so you would’nt have seen the Water.”6 Grief returned later that fall when Mattie’s two-year-old daughter died. Another “ice nest,” Emily wrote.7
In October 1865, Emily returned to Amherst, hopeful this time that Dr. Williams’s treatment had been successful. The next spring, still experiencing minor trouble, she considered going back for another round of care, but Edward Dickinson thought the crisis had passed. Deferring as she usually did to Edward’s wishes, she remained at home. Father “is in the habit of me,” she said.8 As far as anyone knew, Emily’s eye problems had been cured. Thankfully, blindness had been averted, although the family did purchase a copy of Dr. Williams’s new book on ophthalmic science, just in case another emergency occurred.9 Emily never again complained of complications and returned without comment to her usual activity—housework, cooking, reading, writing poems, and corresponding with Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
When Higginson realized Emily had been in Cambridge, he bombarded her with invitations to meet in Boston. Even though she was nearly forty, she again used her father as an excuse for staying home. “I must omit Boston,” she told him. Father “likes me to travel with him but objects that I visit.”10 But Emily did want to see Higginson and extended her own invitation to visit Amherst. The timing for him was not right, though. Higginson was worried about his wife’s health. Mary’s mobility had become so compromised and her muscles so stiff, she had to turn pages of a book with a wand.11 Then there were concerns about money. Higginson was doing everything he could to generate income. At times it seemed like he was on and off trains every week, lecturing with Emerson, speaking to women’s clubs. The conflict he always felt between literature and activism remained: he should be doing more to ensure his soldiers received equal treatment under the law; he should work for woman’s suffrage. He wanted to be in the thick of political action and not like one of those writers disparaged for having their heads in the clouds: men Henry Adams called poorly dressed hypocrites who gazed out windows and proclaimed, “I am raining.”12 Higginson should have taken his own advice. Years before he had written, “The more bent any man is upon action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium.”13 It was balance he needed, not a choice between action and writing. Literature kept him balanced and Emily Dickinson kept his mind on literature. The day was coming when he would finally meet his mysterious poet—a day they both would remember for the rest of their lives. From the moment he set foot on Emily’s doorstep that day, Higginson would write down as much as he could recall about what she said and how she said it. His memory would provide the most intimate account anyone ever recorded of what it felt like to sit across from Emily Dickinson. The two would have to wait until August 1870 before meeting each other. The wait would be worth it. In the meantime, they continued to write.
When another of her poems appeared in print in 1866, Emily was immediately in touch. She was worried Higginson might have seen the verse and doubted her vow to avoid publication. “A narrow fellow in the grass” appeared on the front page of the February 14 Springfield Republican and again in the weekend edition. Even though the poem was anonymous, she fretted about what Mr. Higginson might think and thought it best to explain. “Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me,
” she wrote.14 Apparently Sue had shared the verse with Samuel Bowles, who in turn published it. But this time Emily was angry about its publication, especially because someone had changed her line breaks. She was “defeated,” she said, “of the third line by the punctuation” and complained, “the third and fourth [lines] were one.” The question mark at the end of line three especially disturbed her. Emily did not want so hard a stop, preferring lines three and four to glide together. The words should move continuously to the fifth line, she may have thought, mirroring the motion of the snake sliding from one patch of grass to the next.* She was not pleased her literary intention had been tampered with and added, “I had told you I did not print.” She folded a clipping of the poem into her letter as evidence of her complaint—or perhaps to lend proof that she had another poem published.15
THE SNAKE.
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him–did you not?
His notice instant is,
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your feet,
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn,
Yet when a boy and barefoot,
I more than once at noon
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash,
Unbraiding in the sun,
When stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled and was gone.
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
These Fevered Days Page 17
