These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  Somehow Emily managed to write. Her letter of condolence to Sue was astonishing, drawing on the full power of her genius. She had never written a more beautiful epistle and she had never more keenly felt the triumph of life over death. That she was able to find words at all was remarkable.

  Dear Sue –

  The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled –

  How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the Sea, we find surprises us –

  Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets –

  His Life was panting with them – With what menace of Light he cried “Dont tell, Aunt Emily”! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me. Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!

  He knew no niggard moment – His Life was full of Boon – The Playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his –

  No crescent was this Creature – He traveled from the Full –

  Such soar, but never set –

  I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies – His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself away, his Elegy an echo – his Requiem ecstasy –

  Dawn and Meridian in one.

  Wherefore would we wait, wronged only of Night, which he left for us –

  Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole –

  Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,

  Pangless except for us –

  Who slowly ford the Mystery

  Which thou hast leaped across!

  Emily70

  Later, Sue asked Emily if she would always be beside her. “The first section of Darkness is the densest, Dear,” Emily replied. “After that, Light trembles in – You asked would I remain? Irrevocably, Susan – I know no other way.”71

  The next year, Judge Lord died. A stroke killed the seventy-five-year-old jurist in 1884 while he was reading the newspaper, searching perhaps for articles to send Emily. “Dear Mr Lord has left us,” Emily wrote a friend. “After a brief unconsciousness, a Sleep that ended with a smile, so his Nieces tell us.”72 On her way to bed, Emily would stop before a portrait of Otis. She looked at his curly white hair, his stern expression much like her father’s—a face not so much dignified as wanting to appear so. If she had not loved his expression, Emily said, she would have feared it. His face “had such ascension.”73 She once asked Judge Lord what she should do for him after he died. “Remember Me,’” he had said.74 She took out her pencil as if in reply.

  Go thy great way!

  The Stars thou meetst

  Are even as Thyself –

  For what are Stars but Asterisks

  To point a human Life?75

  On June 14, 1884, three months after Judge Lord died, Emily was in the kitchen at noon making a cake, when suddenly a great darkness came over her. She fainted and did not recover consciousness until evening. When she came to, Austin, Vinnie, and a physician were standing over her. Emily thought she was dying or already was dead—“all was so kind and hallowed,” she said.76 The poet had never fainted in her life, and for weeks she was bedridden until strong enough to sit a few hours in a chair. The doctor’s diagnosis was “revenge of the nerves,” and he prescribed sedatives, tinctures for headaches, and a syrup of French lettuce.77 Emily had her own diagnosis. “The Dyings have been too deep for me,” she said.78 Two months later, while back home in Colorado, Helen Hunt Jackson fell down a flight of stairs and broke her leg. Emily saw the notice in the Republican and wrote her friend immediately. “It was not quite a ‘massacre,’” Helen replied with her usual pluck. “But it was a very bad break – two inches of the big bone smashed in – & the little one snapped: as compound a fracture as is often compounded!”79 She assured Emily she was all right, managing well on crutches, and confident she would be walking soon with a cane. It was merely an involuntary rest cure she told her.80 Helen did need the rest. She had finished her Indian novel in three months, faster than anything she had ever written.81 Ramona caused a sensation and sold 15,000 copies in a matter of months. Thomas Niles was ecstatic. “My life-blood went into it,” Helen wrote her publisher, “all that I had thought, felt, and suffered for five years on the Indian Question.”82 Perhaps thinking the California climate would help her recover, Helen hired a nurse and took rooms in a Los Angeles boardinghouse. She described for Emily the view from her bed. “I am looking straight off towards Japan – over a silver sea – my foreground is a strip of high grass, and mallows, with a row of Eucalyptus trees sixty or seventy feet high.”83 But Helen did not improve. Sick as she was, she still thought about Dickinson’s verse—was still praising it, and still admonishing Emily for not sharing it with the world. “I wish I knew what your portfolios, by this time, hold,” she wrote.84 While a doctor treated her for malaria, he suspected stomach cancer was the underlying cause. He wired William Jackson in Colorado and told him to come at once. By the time Helen’s husband arrived, it was nearly too late. When he saw her, William broke into pieces.85 For all her ceaseless wanderings, Helen had proved to be the perfect match for William Sharpless Jackson. He adored her passion for life, her independence, her love of adventure, and what he called her “too muchness.”86 When Emily received word that Helen had died on August 12, 1885, she wrote Mr. Jackson. “Helen of Troy will die, but Helen of Colorado, never,” she said. “Dear friend, can you walk, were the last words that I wrote her. Dear friend, I can fly—her immortal (soaring) reply.”87

  Dickinson never fully recovered. Fainting in the kitchen was the beginning of the end. Three months after Helen’s death, she was again confined to her bed. She read, wrote letters, and on occasion drafted a poem. She worked on one about Helen, returning again to the image of stars and asterisks. “Did you not give her to me?” she wrote Higginson.88 By the beginning of the year in 1886, Emily’s family kept close watch over her. Austin canceled travel plans to Boston in order to be near, and he and Vinnie had a serious talk about their sister’s health. A neighbor looked up at the big yellow house sitting behind the hemlock hedge and said everything was dark.89 Inside Emily was thinking of flowers, Reverend Wadsworth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and nurturing what she called a “pink and russet hope.”90 Years earlier she had dashed off a note to her Norcross cousins, telling them they had left something behind after a visit at the Homestead. Loo had forgotten a tumbler of sweet peas on top of a bureau, and Emily had an idea about what to do with them. She proposed leaving the flowers in the bureau drawer until they had withered and made pods. They’ll sow themselves in the dark, she wrote, and be ready to blossom later on.91 It was like that now in her room. That spring as she looked around her chamber, everything Emily had sown was blossoming. All the fascicles stitched with thread, all poems hiding in dark drawers. Nearly 2,000 verses in all.‡ There was a long-ago note from the college boy who printed her first valentine, inviting her to a candy pull—with a poem on the back. “Corn,” “Wheat,” “Ice Cream” scrawled on pieces of paper—and poems on the reverse. A fragment of an old Amherst Academy penmanship lesson with a verse scribbled across it. An envelope with the flap opened to resemble a peaked roof—“The way Hope builds his House” written inside.92 Nearly everything she touched became a surface on which to write or a poem itself. Blossoming sweet peas. And there were letters—hundreds and thousands of letters written to Emily over a lifetime, and drafts of her own. The mysterious Master Letters were there too. If Reverend Wadsworth were the intended recipient of those agonizing missives, the poet did not say. From her bed, Emily could see the sun dipping radiant and alive beyond farmhouses to the west. She would remember the singsong of phoebes and the smell of mud when farmers turned over the soil in the spring. She would recall Gilbert’s uncomplicated joy and the way he tipped his cap. She could see her brother at his happiest, planting azaleas and little oaks from the Pelham Hills, and feel Vinnie’s ferocious loyalty. She could hear her father’s triumphant “Amen” after morning prayers, smell her mother’s warm doughnuts. And Carlo, always big, beloved Carlo looking out the wi
ndow, padding near her. The round, fragrant orange on the dining-room sideboard. The soft folds of the Springfield Republican lying unopened on a chair in the library. The pink roses of her chamber wallpaper, the smell of hyacinths on the windowsill, the afternoon light that fell across on her desk, shining like the lustrous tail of a comet streaming just out of sight. “Should you ask what happened here,” she had written, “I should say nothing perceptible. Sweet latent events – too shy to confide.”93

  It had been raining and cloudy in Amherst the second week of May 1886. When the showers finally let up and the sun started shining, strawberries all over the Connecticut River Valley turned red. Frank Wood would have the first of the season for his customers. He always did, unloading big crates of berries at his dining room in the center of town.94 Across the Notch in South Hadley, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary principal Miss Blanchard was counting heads; fifteen students from Mount Holyoke would be spending an afternoon at Amherst College’s art museum. If the weather continued to hold, clerks from Phoenix Row would play a game of baseball with the nine from the local hat shops.95 Everything in Amherst that May was about baseball. In his diary, Austin kept track of Emily’s declining health. “Emily feeling poorly—and so I have kept within her call,” he wrote on May 13.96 Sometime earlier Dickinson had written a note to Fanny and Loo Norcross. “Little Cousins, Called back. Emily.” Five words. Three lines. Nine beats. 4-2-3. Her final poem.97 On Saturday evening May 15, 1886 as choir practice was beginning across the street at First Church, Emily took her last breath. Austin’s diary told the story. “It was settled before morning broke that Emily would not wake again this side. The day was awful. She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistles sounded for six. Mrs Montague and Mrs Jameson were sitting with Vin. I was near by.”98 That night the last vestiges of the week’s clouds disappeared, and the sky over Amherst was clear. Ned, Mattie, and Gib loved studying the heavens and even had a favorite star, Algol. The night Emily died the stars were especially brilliant. The moon was almost full and in the south, Jupiter and Mars were shining brightly. Barely visible and just above the horizon, Algol started to rise, like an asterisk.99

  “DYING IS A wild Night and a new Road,” Emily had written.100 She knew well the chill aftermath of death: the stillness, the numbness, the nerves sitting “ceremonious, like Tombs.”101 Austin and Lavinia went over instructions Emily had left. Mr. Higginson should be contacted in Cambridge. Ask him to read Emily Brontë’s poem at the funeral. All papers should be burned. A simple coffin. A brief service at home. No hearse. The family’s Irish workmen as pallbearers. Austin summoned undertaker Edwin Marsh, who took Dickinson’s final measure. “Death: May 15. Funeral to take place: May 19. Place of Funeral: House. Length to Heel: 5 feet 6 inches.” Dr. Bigelow completed the physician’s certificate: Bright’s disease. Length of illness—2 1/2 years.§ The town clerk added the remaining facts. Twenty-second death of the year in Amherst. Female, single. Fifty-five years. Five months and five days. Occupation: At Home.102

  In the end, Susan was there. “The tie between us is very fine,” Emily had written her most treasured friend, “but a Hair never dissolves.”103 “Thank you, dear Sue – for every solace,” she had written before her death, and another: “Dear Sue, Thanky,” the last two letters never finished.104 Sue took care of the most intimate of duties. She arranged for the local seamstress to sew a white flannel robe in which to wrap Emily’s body. “When we come into the world we are wrapped in soft, white flannel,” Sue said. “I think it fitting that we should leave it that way.”105 She then went to work on the obituary for the newspaper. She wanted to make sure people understood Emily’s seclusion was not a rejection of the world or them. She wanted to stress that Emily’s faith was not repudiation of God, but of dogma. And she wanted to declare that Emily’s words were unparalleled—gleaming, startling, and rapturous.

  The death of Miss Emily Dickinson, daughter of the late Edward Dickinson, at Amherst on Saturday, makes another sad inroad on the small circle so long occupying the old family mansion. It was for a long generation overlooked by death, and one passing in and out there thought of old-fashioned times, when parents and children grew up and passed maturity together, in lives of singular uneventfulness . . . Very few in the village, except among the older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and her intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions. . . . As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship, sitting thenceforth, as some one said of her, “in the light of her own fire.” Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career—her endowments being so exceptional—but the “mesh of her soul,” as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work. All that must be inviolate.106

  That Wednesday afternoon, May 19, the funeral service took place in the Dickinsons’ family library. “To Amherst to the funeral of that rare & strange creature Emily Dickinson,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his diary. When he looked down at Emily’s face in the coffin, he was astonished. She looked like a young woman. There was not a gray hair or a wrinkle. Vinnie bent over beside him and placed two heliotropes by Emily’s hand. To “take to Judge Lord,” she whispered. 107 The funeral was as simple and plain as Emily had wanted. As instructed, Mr. Higginson read lines from Emily Brontë’s poem. But before he did, he added a few words of his own: “Our friend who has just now put on Immortality, and who seemed scarce ever to have taken it off,” he said.108 Then he began, “No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.” Higginson looked around at Edward Dickinson’s old books that still lined the library shelves and smelled springtime blossoms drifting from Emily’s conservatory. The first time he had been in the house was a quarter of a century earlier, when he’d listened as Emily spoke with barely a pause about puddings and clocks and how a poem made her feel. So cold no fire ever can warm me, he remembered her saying.109 He thought about one question she had asked him that memorable afternoon—a question that at the time was so odd and perplexing he wrote it down: “Could you tell me what home is,” she had inquired.110 The answer seemed simple to him. Home was this very house that she loved with all her heart. Home was Amherst. Better than heaven, she said. But Higginson now knew that’s not what Dickinson meant. Home to her was much more. It was the wild terrain of her mind. A world of hummingbirds and crickets and alabaster and dots on a disc of snow. To Emily Dickinson, home was consciousness itself—a continent of language where metaphor was her native tongue.

  I dwell in Possibility –

  A fairer House than Prose –

  More numerous of Windows –

  Superior – for Doors –

  Of Chambers as the Cedars –

  Impregnable of eye –

  And for an everlasting Roof

  The Gambrels of the Sky –

  Of Visitors – the fairest –

  For Occupation – This –

  The spreading wide my narrow Hands

  To gather Paradise – 111

  No one who attended her funeral that day knew Emily Dickinson would become someone else after death. Or that Vinnie would find her cache of poems and not have the heart to burn them.112 No one knew that several years later Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd would approach Thomas Niles at Roberts Brothers in Boston with hundreds of her verses—surely enough for a volume, they thought. No one knew that the book Mr. Niles would publish in 1890 would sell faster and wider than anyone ever could have imagined. No one knew in the centuries that followed that Dickinson would be proclaimed one of the greatest poets in the English language. All the small group of people who gathered in the family library knew was that Emily Dickins
on would be laid to rest next to her parents in the village cemetery. Undertaker Marsh was waiting for them. Sue had made sure the new grave was lined with pine boughs. Across town that afternoon Sabra Snell collected details to enter in her father’s weather journal: Temperature 66. A few clouds. Light breeze.113 It was a beautiful day. Buttercups and violets dotted the grass. At the backdoor of the Homestead, Austin, Sue, Vinnie, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson watched as half a dozen Irish workmen lifted Emily’s coffin. Then the quiet procession headed out past the barn, across the fields, and into the light.