My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  The Poet and the Civil War

  As the North moved toward Abraham Lincoln and the South toward secession, Edward Dickinson continued to flirt with the small Constitutional Unionist Party. Headed by John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts, this party tried to cool the sectional conflict by simply reaffirming the Union and the Constitution. When the “Belleveretts,” as they were derisively called, held a “union meeting” in December 1859, Edward, one of many vice presidents, contributed a letter rebuking the intemperate public tone both North and South and recommending compromise and harmony. In 1860, Massachusetts’ Unionists chose him as their candidate for lieutenant governor. Although he at once declined (Henry Morris, the man who whipped him in 1854, was on the ticket), the Belleverett newspapers were still running his name above their editorial columns ten days later. Writing to Frances in Boston, Emily asked her to “give my respects to the ‘Bell and Everett party’ if she passes that organization on her way to school? I hear they wish to make me Lieutenant-Governor’s daughter. Were they cats I would pull their tails, but as they are only patriots, I must forego the bliss.” Her odd mixture of disdain and respect resembles her father’s mixed signals. At the polls Amherst’s voters chose Lincoln over Bell, 405 to 26. When hostilities commenced, the Unionists were seen as the party of appeasement.

  The next year, in an effort to unite all factions under a common war banner, the state Republicans also made Edward their nominee for lieutenant governor. Now was the time, some thought, for him to stop sulking in his tent and come to the aid of his country. Instead, keeping his distance and his principles, he wrote a long public letter that repudiated “the immediate and universal emancipation of slaves,” on grounds of states’ rights. This stiff-necked Whiggishness brought an immediate public denunciation from “Warrington,” the Republican’s Boston columnist. Contrasting the poet’s father to Edward Everett, who consented to join the cause, “Warrington” wrote that “the difference between him and Mr Dickinson is the difference between a patriot and a partisan, a liberal and a bigot, a man and a mouse.” It was a bitter moment.

  Yet, even as Edward kept clear of all parties, he vigorously backed the northern war effort, offering bounties to volunteers and sending fire-breathing letters of support to the leaders with whom he refused to act. To Senator Charles Sumner, a radical abolitionist in the eyes of old-line Whigs, he dispatched a heated statement condemning not just the South but the spectrum of northern political opinion: “This infernal rebellion which must soon be put down forever! & forever!! will so shake up the extremes of conservatism & radicalism, that true views of our Republican Institutions will be widespread, and enduring! & our gov’t be exorcised of the unclean devils who have made their ‘dens’ in our very Council Chambers!” This intemperate prediction, as utopian as it is incoherent, hardly accords with Edward’s earlier defense of moderation. After listening to one of these diatribes in 1864, George Shepard noted privately that he seemed to forget he had “always been in action a conservative or a pro slavery man.” Still, the poet’s father sometimes realized how he struck others. An 1868 letter to Sumner ends, “Excuse my croaking.”

  Emily’s position relative to the war was as oblique and conflicted as her father’s. Once, she looked forward to watering geraniums in the winter when Sue and Vinnie, with their more martial feelings, would “have gone to the War.” Unlike many patriotic women, she refused to help make bandages. As she put it in 1861, she could not “weave Blankets, or Boots,” and thus would “have no winter this year – on account of the soldiers.” Remote from the physical and emotional dangers combatants faced, she sounded her odd brittle note when a Yankee on his way to war stopped to request a nosegay: “I suppose he thought we kept an Aquarium.”

  In February and March 1864, as Karen Dandurand discovered, three of her poems appeared in Drum Beat, a short-run Brooklyn paper designed to raise money for medical care for Union soldiers; in April, “Success is counted sweetest” came out in the Brooklyn Daily Union. Since the first of these papers was edited by an Amherst College trustee and occasional guest at the Evergreens, the Reverend Richard Salter Storrs, Jr., it has been thought that he may have secured Emily’s work by going through Sue. Another good possibility is Sue’s friend in Brooklyn, Gertrude Vanderbilt, a publishing writer who helped organize sanitary fairs in New York. Whoever the persuader was, Dandurand believes the Drum Beat poems were not submitted “surreptitiously,” like some other Dickinson poems published in her lifetime, but appeared with her consent.

  Perhaps, but letters from Samuel Bowles tell a different story. A facility called Soldiers’ Rest had been established in Springfield to care for the many sick and wounded combatants passing through the city. When a money-raising fair was organized in December 1864 to pay for expenses, Samuel asked Austin three times, apparently without success, to lend some paintings for the art exhibit. About the same time, drumming up contributions for a short-run sheet to be sold at the fair, the editor wrote Sue: “Speaking of writing, do you & Emily give us some gems for the ‘Springfield Musket’, & then come to the Fair.” The publication he named was a literary miscellany in the form of a newspaper, issued in four numbers over the duration of the fair. This appeal also failed: it was as hard to get the poet to join the war as it was to overcome the standoffishness of her father and brother.

  And yet, like them, she was deeply engaged by the spectacle of victory, defeat, and death, often expressing thoughts others left silent. A few months before Frazar Stearns was killed, she hoped “that ruddy face won’t be brought home frozen.” When a professor’s widow lost the second of her sons, she spoke feelingly of the woman’s collapse and pictured the young man’s ghost “riding tonight in the mad wind – back to the village burying-ground where he never dreamed of sleeping: Ah! the dreamless sleep!” After Bowles was back from Europe in fall 1862, Dickinson informed him that “we used to tell each other, when you were from America – how failure in a Battle – were easier – and you here.” From this, we surmise she shared the North’s dismay after the Second Battle of Bull Run, in August.

  The few poems that explicitly touch on the war, such as “When I was small, a woman died” (Fr518) or “It feels a shame to be alive” (Fr524), were inspired by fatalities. “It dont sound so terrible quite as it did” (Fr384) may have been suggested by Stearns’s death. Fascicle 23, from late 1862, contains two dramatizations of an emphatic willingness to die: in “Wolfe demanded during dying” (Fr482) the fatally wounded opposing generals in the eighteenth-century battle for Quebec find it “easy” and “sweet” to die for their cause, and in “He fought like those who’ve nought to lose” (Fr480B) a combatant with no “further Use” for life emerges unharmed, unlike his fallen comrades. The Civil War offered Dickinson a stark symbolic theater, a place of ultimate terror and exultation in which mundane life was forgotten and there was both everything and nothing to lose. War gave her a powerful vehicle with which to parse her own extremity.

  Whether deliberately or not, the poem Dickinson sandwiched between the two last-mentioned works is her one first-person poem about fame:

  Fame of Myself, to justify,

  All other Plaudit be

  Superfluous – An Incense

  Beyond Nescessity –

  Fame of Myself to lack – Although

  My Name be else supreme –

  This were an Honor honorless –

  A futile Diadem –

  Fr481

  Others’ praise could neither justify her self-approval (“Fame of Myself”) nor compensate for its absence. Enclosed by two poems about an honorable performance in battle, these lines, apparently shown to no one, underline what Dickinson’s work as a whole all but proclaims: she wasn’t driven by a quest for recognition. Rather, her writing was the expression of a hard existential fight that could not be shirked, and for which no attitude was quite so fitting as a gay tragic irony. Knowing that others were also fighting counted for a great deal.

 
Apotheosis

  It has long been understood that Dickinson’s productivity climaxed in the first half of the 1860s. Thomas Johnson believed she composed 86 poems in 1861, 366 in 1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. R. W. Franklin’s more recent tally yields 88 poems in 1861, 227 in 1862, 295 in 1863, and 98 in 1864. Although these later figures are more trustworthy, they should still be taken as mere estimates of her astonishing output. On some days she must have produced more than one poem, perhaps many more. “I send Two Sunsets,” begins a lighthearted boast from 1863 about her fecundity:

  Day and I – in competition ran –

  I finished Two – and several Stars –

  While He – was making One –

  Fr557B

  But we remind ourselves that this is not a diary entry and that we know almost nothing about the daily originating matrix of the writer’s work. We have no rough drafts of poems from the early 1860s, no notebooks, no authorial memoirs telling us how the writing connected with the events of life. A few poems can be dated exactly and most of the rest with a fair approximation, and of course we learn something by seeing how some of them are bedded in letters. Yet it often happens that the poems that speak of the most vital of private experiences were preserved in the manuscript books only, giving us virtually no context.

  Only a few of Dickinson’s early first-person poems—“I never lost as much but twice” (Fr39), “Heart! We will forget him” (Fr64)—seem to tell stories about the writer. Around 1860, poems of this type become much more abundant, sometimes placing a first-person experience in the present, sometimes in the past, but generally implying a passionate inquiry into the writer’s peculiar destiny. In “I was the slightest in the house,” the speaker reflects on her modesty and sense of privacy: “I could not bear to live – aloud –/The Racket shamed me so” (Fr473). In “I had been hungry all the years,” she imagines approaching a loaded table after long starvation, but only to feel “ill – and odd” (Fr439). In another, she looks back on her earlier life as one of chronic and vital deprivation: “It would have starved a Gnat –/To live so small as I” (Fr444). Full as they are of exaggerated and fabulistic elements, these dramatic first-person retrospects articulate a very real personal effort—that “tug for a life” that Dickinson spoke of to Louisa Norcross in late 1859.

  In these colorful autobiographies, Dickinson assumed the mask of fiction in order to tease out her essentials. In “The Malay took the pearl” (Fr451), a noble speaker contrasts his timidity with the desperate boldness of a dark-skinned rival, who dives and wins the prize: “The Negro never knew/I – wooed it – too.” Drawing on an article in Harper’s Monthly with illustrations of dark-skinned pearl divers, the poem gives us its maker’s ongoing meditation on aspiration and singleness (“I spilt the dew,” “by birth a Bachelor”). But how far do we go in fitting the story this poem tells to the facts of her life? Those who make Austin the Malay, Sue the jewel, and Emily the earl who might have dived for her seem at once too literal and too allegorical, and too unwilling to grant the poet her projective liberties. She was also the triumphant Malay, after all. The “as if” idea, explicit in many poems—“As if some little Arctic flower” (Fr177), “As if the sea should part” (Fr720), “As if a Goblin with a Guage” (line 10, Fr425)—was surely taken for granted in many more.

  But there is still personal reference; if the poems’ fables change, their emotional core does not; they are always welling up from a massive central volcano, like the lava flows on Mars. “I dwell in possibility,” which seems to be about the undisciplined fancy, the imagination set free from the conditions of life, announces its true subject in its final words: “The spreading wide my narrow Hands/To gather Paradise” (Fr466). That subject is, first and last, desire, and when the topic shifts to heaven, that is because it is the only place where earth’s broken conversations can be completed. Emily had worked it out at age twenty: “Dont you think . . . these brief imperfect meetings have a tale to tell . . . whose site is in the skies.”

  By 1862, the poet was pushing this germinal idea very far indeed:

  Heaven is so far of the Mind

  That were the Mind dissolved –

  The Site – of it – by Architect

  Could not again be proved –

  ’Tis Vast – as our Capacity –

  As fair – as our idea –

  To Him of adequate desire

  No further ’tis, than Here.

  Fr413

  “So far” carries the sense of to that extent, though without excluding the idea of distance. Like “I dwell in possibility,” the poem says that just because paradise is something dreamed by the mind, it is within reach of anyone whose desire is adequate. Beginning with the infinite, Dickinson returns to its generative source—the soul trapped in a body trapped in empty space.

  Many poems—“He forgot and I remembered” (Fr232), “I showed her hights she never saw” (Fr346)—treat the same questions we hear in letter after letter: Why don’t you write, why is so-and-so silent, do I alone remember, have I offended, won’t you forgive, won’t you write? When Vinnie summed up a basic pattern of her sister’s life—the loss of friends (“cut to the heart when death robbed her again and again”)—the statement would have been even truer if “neglect” were paired with “death.” In a poem probably sent to Bowles, Dickinson seems to try to control her affectionate nature:

  What shall I do – it whimpers so –

  This little Hound within the Heart

  All day and night with bark and start –

  Fr237A

  In an even more extreme poem, she is a crucified lovebird lavishing her last blood-soaked melody on the man who has given her the death-thrust:

  Stab the Bird – that built in your bosom –

  Oh, could you catch her last Refrain –

  Bubble! “forgive” – “Some better” – Bubble!

  “Carol for Him – when I am gone”!

  Fr309

  The final couplet exhibits the songbird’s oozing heart, each “Bubble!” representing the bloody froth that mingles with her last words (in quotes). Like Jesus’ “forgive them for they know not what they do,” the dying “Refrain” seeks what is best for the murderer. This shocking poem goes way beyond the bounds of good taste and proper self-respect. But how does someone living in “possibility” draw the line?

  The idea of extreme pain, appearing in a few poems in 1859, became one of Dickinson’s major subjects in the early 1860s. Of the twenty-one instances of the word “hurt” in her poems (noun or verb), every single one occurs between 1860 and 1863. The apparatus of torture—“gimblets” (Fr242), “metallic grin” (Fr243), “A Weight with Needles” (Fr294)—now becomes almost routine, along with references to Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion, generally linked to the speaker’s own passion. In a fascicle poem possibly dating from spring 1861, the speaker emphasizes the immediacy of her pain, felt in the act of writing:

  I shall know why – when Time is over –

  And I have ceased to wonder why –

  Christ will explain each separate anguish

  In the fair schoolroom of the sky –

  He will tell me what “Peter” promised –

  And I – for wonder at his woe –

  I shall forget the drop of anguish

  That scalds me now – that scalds me now!

  Fr215

  Peter promised to stand by his Master in his hour of trial, then denied knowing him. What the speaker hopes is that when she gets to heaven and Christ tells her of the agony of his abandonment, she will at last be able to stop thinking about her own. Wishing for nothing so much as the cessation of her anguish, Dickinson does not much look like a masochist in this poem.

  In 1862, after the pain had receded, Dickinson wrote in retrospect about

  . . . the Prayer

  I knew so perfect – yesterday –

  That scalding one – Sabacthini –

  Recited fluent – here –

  Fr2
83C

  “Lama sabachthini”—“Why hast thou forsaken me?”—were Jesus’ last words on the cross. The poem, sent to Louisa and Frances (apparently between their parents’ deaths), justifies pain in the orthodox way, as beneficial for the soul. This was the argument in the Wadsworth sermon sent to Dickinson in 1858: “Character is the creature of development and discipline. It depends quite as much upon experience of pain, as of pleasure.”

  Be that as it may (and Dickinson does seem to have taken the idea to heart), her most impressive treatments of suffering—“I like a look of agony” (Fr339), “I felt a funeral in my brain” (Fr340), “After great pain a formal feeling comes” (Fr372)—offer no such justification. We note as well that these three poems, entered about 1862 in manuscript books 16 and 18, aren’t known to have been shown to anyone.

  “Wife”

  Many of the pain poems from 1861 and 1862 join a large group dealing with a first-person speaker’s attachment to an unnamed man, variously addressed or spoken of as “Master,” “Signor,” “Sir,” “Caviler,” “he,” “him,” or “you.” One of the things that makes this cycle of love lyrics so remarkable is the fullness of voice it gives to frustrated desire and energetic fantasizing. At times, as in “Again his voice is at the door” (Fr274) or the commemorative “One year ago jots what?” (Fr301, early 1862?), the speaker seems to be dwelling on a past event. At other times she expresses a desire to be with him again, either for eternity—“Forever at his side to walk” (Fr264)—or just an hour—“What would I give to see his face?” (Fr266). Invariably, the distances between them are impassable, as in “Ah, moon and star!” where she ends by admitting “He – is more than a firmament – from me” (Fr262). In spite of this, she reaffirms her faithfulness again and again, as in another lunar poem likening the absent lover to the moon and herself to the responsive tides: