In spring 1869, on a visit to the Dickinsons, Louisa sat outside and gathered a petticoat for Mrs. Dickinson while the hired man, Horace Church, was in a tree, grafting scions and “ogling” (Emily’s word) the visitor. That fall, when her cousin’s troubles had cleared up, the poet rejoiced “that my wren can rise and touch the sky again. We all have moments with the dust, but the dew is given.” Again, one notes the emphatic resiliency.
The spirited letters sent to Elizabeth Holland in 1865 and 1866 offer further evidence that Emily wasn’t held down by the low spirits that depressed Sue and Samuel. She couldn’t “stop smiling” when Father discovered to his chagrin that his steelyard had been giving him an unfair advantage, or when her second cousin Perez Cowan, a senior at Amherst, revealed that Elizabeth would be present to back her up at the annual reception. Elizabeth had a cheerful and elastic personality, and Emily’s letters to her are full of ecstatic springtime dispatches: “The Wind blows gay today and the Jays bark like Blue Terriers,” or again, “I hear today for the first the river in the tree.” Still, as was the case in many other relationships, the poet’s great affection for this friend was to some extent a product of distance:
After you went, a low wind warbled through the house like a spacious bird, making it high but lonely. When you had gone the love came. I supposed it would. The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone.
Shame is so intrinsic in a strong affection. . . .
Comparing this to the poet’s early letters to Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Sue Gilbert, we see how much her understanding of human intimacy had matured. The old, seductive dream of perfect union with another had been left far behind.
Once, after Elizabeth made the mistake of sending a joint letter to the Dickinson sisters, she received a brisk reproof:
Sister,
A mutual plum is not a plum. I was too respectful to take the pulp and do not like a stone.
Send no union letters. The soul must go by Death alone, so, it must by life, if it is a soul.
If a committee – no matter . . .
The implication is that some of us—but not the writer, and not Elizabeth—are merely aggregated entities.
Nothing made the poet’s toughness stand out in high relief like the religious platitudes she had grown up with. Perez Cowan, a descendant of the Dickinsons who moved to Tennessee in the 1820s, was converted at fourteen and before entering the ministry impressed a college classmate as “one of the sweetest natures that I ever met . . . a paragon of refinement, demeanor, morality, and religious devotion.” After the sister closest to him in age, Nannie Cowan Meem, died of a “wasting” disease, Perez sent Dickinson a statement of his faith in the hereafter. Presently, the poet registered her tart dissent:
You speak with so much trust of that which only trust can prove, it makes me feel away, as if my English mates spoke sudden in Italian.
It grieves me that you speak of Death with so much expectation. . . . Dying is a wild Night and a new Road.
Knowing how “hard” and unconsolatory her words were, she wished she could soften them in direct speech: “We bruise each other less in talking than in writing.” But she still sent the letter.
A poem recorded slightly later conveys Dickinson’s repugnance for dogmatic certainty and axiomatic truth:
Experiment escorts us last –
His pungent company
Will not allow an Axiom
An Opportunity –
Fr1181
We never know what awaits us at the “last”: in one respect at least, Dickinson had gone back to the Calvinism of her flinty ancestors, who insisted that no one could possibly know ahead of time who would be let into heaven by their unfathomable deity.
A Quite Rugged Woman in White
From the dying Violetta of La Traviata to various white-appareled avatars in popular American culture, the frail, poetic female saint was a major nineteenth-century type—in some men’s eyes. Joseph Lyman had two friends he associated with this pure, retiring ideal, Araminta Wharton of Nashville and Emily Dickinson of Amherst, neither of whom, he felt sure, would ever marry. At some point between his return North in September 1863 and his death from smallpox in January 1872, he renewed his acquaintance with Dickinson, now much more reclusive than when he last saw her in 1851. Afterward, he made their interview, what could pass for one, the basis of an impressionistic portrait, followed by a series of excerpts from Dickinson’s letters. An experienced journalist, Lyman apparently had some sort of article in mind. The plan was to catch the reader’s attention with a dramatic entrance:
Emily
“Things are not what they seem”
NIGHT IN MIDSUMMER
A Library dimly lighted, five three mignonettes in a little stand. Enter a spirit clad in white, figure so draped as to be misty[,] face moist, translucent alabaster, forehead firmer as of statuary marble. Eyes once bright hazel now melted & fused so as to be two, dreamy, wondering wells of expression, eyes that see no forms but gla[n]ce swiftly & at once to the core of all things—hands small, firm, deft but utterly discharged emancipated from all fleshly clasping[s?] of perishable things, very firm strong little hands absolutely under control of the brain, types of quite rugged health. Mouth made for nothing & used for nothing but uttering choice speech, rare words thoughts, glittering starry misty words figures, winged words.
This description is so dematerialized and “misty” (mouth not used for eating?) that doubts as to its accuracy inevitably arise. Many years after it was committed to paper, the poet’s death prompted Lyman’s widow to drop a breezy note on one of his old associates: “I was just ‘bursting’ with a letter when that notice of Emily Dickinson’s death came, but I said ‘No, I wont write till he does’. . . . You didn’t see Emily, did you? Mr. Lyman didn’t really see her, tho’ he talked with her.” This more or less confirms that her husband’s portrayal was not strictly based on observation, being in part a fanciful spirit-sketch the public could be expected to recognize and appreciate.
But the white attire, something all Emily-watchers made a point of specifying, seems to be accurate. From the Bible to popular culture, the absence of color was a symbol of sinlessness, spirituality, renunciation. Exactly when the poet began wearing white year-round isn’t known. In December 1860, as if putting a stop to rumor, she pointedly asked Louisa Norcross to “tell ‘the public’ that at present I wear a brown dress.” But in early 1862 she recorded a poem that speaks of a vocation for white as a sign of singleness and dedication:
A solemn thing – it was – I said –
A Woman – white – to be –
And wear – if God should count me fit –
Her blameless mystery –
Fr307
Dickinson’s one surviving article of clothing is a white cotton dress thought to have been sewn circa 1878–1882. Of the type known as a house dress or wrapper and designed for daily life at home, the garment has a loosely fitted waist, round collar, cuffs, and a pocket; the fabric is a patterned dimity. With its tucks and gores and edge lacing and mother-of-pearl buttons (in front), the dress looks ornate to modern eyes but was ordinary and unpretentious as compared to Gilded Age fashions, which were form-fitting and expensive and involved exacting procedures for sewing, wearing, and maintaining. Whatever Dickinson’s purpose in adopting simple white wear, there were good practical reasons for sticking to it: no corsets or expensive dressmakers were required, and one could forget about dyes fading or running. *135 (Once, when the poet added her sister’s shoes and bonnet to the wash “to have them nice when she got home,” Margaret O’Bryan “accused Vinnie of calicoes”—figured cottons. Evidently, the color had run.)
A fastidious upper-middle-class woman who preferred to wear white wrappers might understandably be averse to receiving well-dressed callers. To the extent that Dickinson abandoned fashion, in other words, she would have had yet another reason to elude the public gaze. As early as 1867, if a Mack family member’s reminiscence can be trus
ted, Dickinson had begun to talk to certain visitors from the other side of a door “which stood ajar.” Similarly, the local undertaker remembered “Miss Emily” as “coyally greeting me from behind the bannister but never seeing me.” Some such practice would explain how Lyman, going up to Massachusetts with Crandell (also in publishing), could talk to the poet but not “really see her.”
Although Dr. Williams wanted Dickinson to have a follow-up exam in May 1866, her eyes were well enough in late 1865 for her to make final copies in ink of thirty-nine poems; by March her father decided she could do without the checkup. Since she never again spoke of her eyes as troubling her, even in writing Elizabeth Holland, whose visual problems led to the surgical removal of an eye in 1872, there is little basis for suspecting an ongoing, let alone a permanent, impairment.
Was Dickinson’s health as “rugged” as Lyman said? In spring 1868, her father informed a brother-in-law that “we are having bad colds,” adding eleven days later that, “with the exception of colds, we are quite well.” That seems to have been shortly before Emily wrote Sue, “I have not tasted Spring – Should there be other Aprils, We will perhaps dine.” Once, writing her cousins, she spoke of “physical weakness” and said she was “in bed to-day – a curious place for me.” In late 1869 she thanked Louisa “for recollecting my weakness. I am not so well as to forget I was ever ill, but better and working. I suppose we must all ‘ail till evening.’” It may have been the following May that, speaking of herself in the third person, she told Louisa that “your remembrance of her is very sweetly touching. She is so weak and lonely.” (The last sentence, transcribed for Mabel Loomis Todd, was later suppressed, and has until now not seen print.) That summer, however, the poet was well enough to invite Higginson to Amherst. All in all, though the evidence is vague and conflicting, Dickinson’s health looks somewhat less than “rugged” in 1866–1870, though not as threatening as her sister-in-law’s (as reflected in Samuel’s letters).
During the entire five-year period, there is only one poem that sounds the accent of a self-sacrificial invalid. Making herself “fit” for the sake of others, the poet turns the word into a verb to capture the sense of “fight”:
I fit for them – I seek the Dark
Till I am thorough fit.
The labor is a sober one
With this sufficient Sweet
That abstinence of mine produce
A purer food for them . . .
Fr1129
Written in pencil and thus harder to date than manuscripts in ink, these lines have been conjecturally assigned to 1866. If composed earlier, during the compulsory avoidance of light in 1864 and 1865, they may have been prompted by the provisional discipline of inactivity. We recall Dickinson’s excuse for not seeing Bowles in late 1862: “I gave my part that they might have the more.”
Yet most of the poems and letters from this period show a robust interest in life and a continuing effort at compact and energetic expression. Once, when Vinnie was gone and the poet had the housekeeping, she sent Sue one of her liveliest self-portraits: “I am so hurried with Parents that I run all Day with my tongue abroad, like a Summer Dog.” When Sue went to the coast in 1866, not long after the publication of Cape Cod, Emily expressed her enthusiasm for her latest idol by asking, “Was the Sea cordial? Kiss him for Thoreau.” When a new acquaintance happened to quote Thoreau, *136 she “hastened to press her visitor’s hand as she said, ‘From this time we are acquainted.’” If the visitor, like the teller of this anecdote, was Ellen E. Dickinson (a first cousin’s bride), the meeting probably occurred in September 1869. Hidden as she was and relatively quiescent, Dickinson was emphatically not in retreat from life. What Lyman may have meant by “rugged health” was her obvious and amazing vitality. Maybe that was why he headed his sketch, “Things are not what they seem.”
Others
Dickinson’s impetus came not only from “nature” or “thought,” as she said in “There is another loneliness” (Fr1138), but from her various friends, some old, some new. This aspect of her life is nicely summed up by her advice to Perez Cowan, mourning for his sister: “I am glad you are working. Others are anodyne. You remembered Clara.” Perez’s painkiller was his remembering to send best wishes for Clara Newman, who had recently married and escaped the Evergreens, taking Anna with her. (“Marm D [Sue] will have to wait on her own children,” said tart Mary Bowles.) A complex dynamic was moving to the center of the poet’s existence as her obsession with the “one” receded and she turned to others precisely on the basis of her accepted singularity. More than ever now, she entered others’ lives only as someone utterly different from them.
In late 1865, at the end of her productive period, Dickinson had composed a postmortem on an experience she did not specify:
Ashes denote that Fire was –
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature’s sake
That hovered there awhile . . .
Fr1097
Three or four years later, a breath blowing over those ashes, she realized they were not dead after all:
The smouldering embers blush –
Oh Heart within the Coal
Hast thou survived so many years?
The smouldering embers smile –
Soft stirs the news of Light
The stolid seconds glow
This requisite has Fire that lasts
It must at first be true –
Fr1143
This, the one openly erotic poem of these years, harks back to the earlier poems expressing a fixed interest in a man who has left the speaker’s orbit. The manuscript, a rough draft in pencil, has been assigned to “about 1868.” In April 1869 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Charles Wadsworth had accepted a call from one of that city’s churches. He and his family sailed from San Francisco for Panama on June 30, *137and on July 24 The New York Times reported their arrival. If the news (“news of Light”) reached Dickinson, possibly through the Hollands or the Dudleys, “The smouldering embers blush” may be the response, saying what she had said so often in the privacy of her manuscript books: her fire was undying.
Another poem on renewal, addressed to “Mr Bowles,” may have been written after the editor spent the night at the Evergreens in June 1870:
He is alive, this morning –
He is alive – and awake –
Birds are resuming for Him –
Blossoms – dress for His sake . . .
But the fresh summer concert ends in discord and paralysis:
. . . Me – Only –
Motion, and am dumb.
Fr1173
As this miserable conclusion virtually predicts, the poem, though addressed to Bowles, remained with the poet’s papers. She was not yet able to resume singing to this former friend.
Instead, her most enlivening and productive encounter was with the male friend she had not yet met. By war’s end, Higginson had settled in Newport, Rhode Island, which happened to lack a convenient rail link with Amherst. In 1868, he wrote Edward Tuckerman, the Amherst College botanist, that he “dreamed of coming to Amherst, to see you & my unseen correspondent Emily Dickinson.” The following spring Higginson strongly urged her to come to Boston to meetings of either the Radical Club or the Women’s Club, the two leading intellectual societies open to her sex. The former—advanced, sometimes erudite—met once a month. The latter, founded the previous year, was identified with the highbrow New England wing of the suffrage movement. Higginson was determined to draw Dickinson out and at last make contact. “You see I am in earnest,” he wrote.
It is a mark of Dickinson’s honesty that, in turning him down, she did not cite her health or some other presentable excuse, but instead wrote: “Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” No other passage so clearly establishes the link between her sense of spatial limits and the perimeter established by Edward Dickinson. She
was saying more emphatically and definitively what she had already twice hinted at with Higginson: “I must omit Boston. Father prefers so. He likes me to travel with him but objects that I visit.” “Father objects because he is in the habit of me.”
Her strong refusal is one of only six instances in Dickinson’s lifetime of correspondence where we can compare a letter of hers to the letter she was answering. Higginson didn’t see how she could live alone and yet originate such rare thoughts. Her reply had an aphoristic finality: “You noticed my dwelling alone – To an Emigrant, Country is idle except it be his own.” He spoke of the “strange power” of her letters and poems. She responded with her odd interpretation of Matthew 6:13, that the Power included the Kingdom and the Glory. He said he wished to assure himself that she was “real” and mentioned a mutual acquaintance, a woman, who couldn’t “tell me much.” She said her life could be of no interest to others and denied anyone’s authority to speak for her: “My life has been too simple and stern to embarrass any. ‘Seen of Angels’ *138 scarcely my responsibility.” He: “you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you.” She: “I am sure that you speak the truth, because the noble do, but your letters always surprise me.”
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