To be sure, her remarks were not meant to be direct replies, especially when she told him, “You were not aware that you saved my Life. To thank you in person has been since then one of my few requests.” Just as Dickinson sometimes rejected others’ gifts, she found it no easy matter acknowledging what she felt were her debts. A stanza sent to Sue says,
Gratitude – is not the mention
Of a Tenderness,
But its still appreciation
Out of Plumb of Speech –
Fr1120B
The task of acknowledging what she owed Higginson would prove tense and delicate.
In August 1870 he finally found time to go to Amherst. But first, there was a misunderstanding and another wild carom of a response. Under the impression he was to come a day earlier, Dickinson prepared herself for an arrival that failed to materialize. The result, her visitor amusedly informed his wife, was that she “dreamed all night of you (not me).” What made this dreaming all the more striking was that the poet had known of his wife only through a passing reference in a three-year-old article of his. This was not the first time that wifehood, a packed subject, had risen to the surface in connection with a new and married male friend. One of the first poems sent to Bowles had toyed with the idea of trading places with his wife: “If she had been the Mistletoe/And I had been the Rose” (Fr60A).
The visitor’s wife, Mary Channing Higginson, permanently confined, suffered from what was called “relaxation or softening of the muscles” and may have been multiple sclerosis. She was pungent and judgmental to the point of being disagreeable, her wit being “of the keenest, and her humor peculiarly her own.” Realizing how much her isolation told on her (this helps explain Higginson’s reaction to Dickinson’s seclusion), her husband tried to be a window on the world for her, giving her his fresh impressions of people and events. That is why, tired as he was on the night of August 16, 1870, he made a point of sending a full report of his two sessions with the poet, whom he had seen in the afternoon and evening and who had exhausted him.
The Dickinsons’ home reminded him of the households depicted by the 1860s’ most transgressive novelist, Elizabeth Stoddard, whose loosely organized families consist of striking individualists, among them Cassandra Morgeson, the most sexually adventurous heroine of the period.
In the entry hall he heard a “step like a pattering child’s & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair . . . in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl.” He was looking for what his wife would notice. Twice he used the word “childlike.” His hostess presented him with two day lilies as her “introduction,” then, asking him to “[f]orgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say,” she began talking. She talked “continuously” but “deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her”—and then resuming. Comparing her to other seemingly uninhibited naifs, such as Louisa May Alcott’s often fatuous father, he judged her to be “thoroughly ingenuous & simple.” Although he doubted his wife would care for her, he considered much of what she said “wise.” Her parting speech—“Gratitude is the only secret that cannot reveal itself”—tells us she hadn’t been able to express what she felt she owed him for having “saved my Life.” As he walked away, he carried the photograph she had given him of Barrett Browning’s grave, a gift that probably meant more to the hostess than to the visitor.
The next day Higginson recorded as many of Dickinson’s dicta as he could recollect: “Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?” “I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15. My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know.” What she said about Edward in letters and in person undoubtedly influenced Higginson’s first impression of the sixty-seven-year-old man, who struck the visitor as “thin dry & speechless—I saw what her life has been.” Soon after, venturing a distinction—“Her father was not severe I should think but remote”—he tried to capture the distances he sensed.
Only after the train had carried him into Vermont and New Hampshire did Higginson record his relief. “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. *139 I am glad not to live near her.” Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: “The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and of something abnormal.”
It would be a mistake to react to this as Austin might, with a smile. Higginson had a more extensive acquaintance with New England’s literary, intellectual, and radical circles than anyone else who tried to describe the poet. He had known all kinds, was liberal and tolerant, and had the occasion and the patience to make a timely memorandum. His thumbnail sketch of Emily Dickinson, the most detailed and vivid on record, is probably the most truthful we will ever have. We should listen to him when he says, with relief, “I am glad not to live near her.” And we should think about Sue, trapped next to this powerhouse for thirty years.
Chapter 20
1870–1878: Wisdom That Won’t Go Stale
Poems of Retrospection
The year Dickinson turned forty marked the end of her four-year recessional and the start of a long and level period of compositional activity. Without approaching the output of her fighting years, she averaged thirty-five poems annually in the 1870s, dropping to twenty-three the year her mother broke a hip.
From 1871 to 1875, resuming her practice of 1865, Dickinson made clean copies of her poetry on folded sets of stationery. This self-editing, however, was more selective and sporadic than the systematic preservation of 1858–1865, when she preserved the vast preponderance of her work in manuscript books and sets. In the seventies the proportions were reversed, two-thirds of her poems never being collected. Many were sent to friends or kept in clean copies, but most joined a large accumulation of drafts penciled on scraps of stationery, notepaper, or wrapping paper, on discarded letters, envelopes, Commencement programs for Massachusetts Agricultural College, advertising circulars, and the like. Among these are the only known copies of a few of her best-known creations, such as “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (Fr1263), along with a quantity of inferior work, some of it sketchy, repetitive, obscure. Like other explosively original writers, Dickinson couldn’t avoid a certain loss of energy and freshness. At times, going back to ideas she had previously explored, she failed to really reenter and revivify them. Still, she hadn’t lost her fantastic alertness.
About 1872 Dickinson composed some lines on a state of mind that would have seemed quite improbable ten years earlier:
A Stagnant pleasure like a Pool
That lets its Rushes grow
Until they heedless tumble in
And make the Water slow
Impeding navigation bright
Of Shadows going down
Yet even this shall rouse itself
When Freshets come along –
Fr1258
Whatever it is that clogs the poet’s quick responsiveness, which used to allow heaven’s shadows to come down through her fresh waters, she is confident that spring’s freshets will restore movement and transparency. Neither accepting nor lamenting the present dullness, the poem reaffirms the anticipatory attitude at the center of Dickinson’s work.
We hear the accents of lament, however, in another poem concerned with slowness of response:
Oh Shadow on the Grass!
Art thou a step or not?
Go make thee fair, my Candidate –
My nominated Heart!
Oh Shadow on the Grass!
While I delayed to dress *140
Some other thou did’st consecrate –
Oh unelected Face!
Fr1237A
Is it a particular human step that might be approaching, or does the shadow stand for the poetic truth that awaits the prepared heart? Wh
atever the answer, the speaker’s lethargy in dressing or guessing proves irremediable.
But this was Dickinson’s only truly regretful poem of the 1870s. In her best work, she managed to express her visionary ardor without forgetting or ignoring her accumulated experience. A case in point is her fabulous riddle on desire and union, which again features the two-stanza, eight-line structure that was so integral to her art:
The Sea said “Come” to the Brook –
The Brook said “Let me grow” –
The Sea said “then you will be a Sea –
I want a Brook – Come now”!
The Sea said “Go” to the Sea –
The Sea said “I am he
You cherished” – “Learned Waters –
Wisdom is stale – to Me” –
Fr1275C
The union the sea desires is consummated between stanzas. As the dialogue resumes, the brook has lost its freshness and appeal along with its identity, and thus the final exchange can only be between sea and sea (the middle speech coming from the former brook). What begins in desire ends in disillusionment, tautology, boredom—someone talking to himself. There is a dazzling gnomic finality here, a simplicity that knows it needn’t bother with fancy language. Dickinson was saying what she had often said—without distance and dissatisfaction there can be no life, energy, desire—but saying it in a way that was anything but stale.
About 1873 she sent Higginson another eight-line treatment of consciousness and desire, accompanied by some leaves:
Dominion lasts until obtained –
Possession just as long –
But these – endowing as they flit
Eternally belong.
How everlasting are the Lips
Known only to the Dew –
These are the Brides of permanence –
Supplanting me and you.
Fr1299
Though the opening lines resist comprehension, they simply carry the poet’s basic paradox one step further. If the pleasures of power and possession are essentially anticipatory, “Dominion,” achieved only as the mind looks forward, will always vanish at the moment of consummation. What that means is that enjoyment lasts (reversing the received idea) only “until obtained.” Since the leaves are not subject to the laws of consciousness, they get what we humans only dream of: immediate contact with freshness, “the Dew.” Engaged in an eternal kiss, they know the permanent bliss we vainly arrogate to ourselves, in this way “Supplanting me and you.” The last line is exquisite, with that participially embedded “plant” and the direct address that brings in the reader only to forbid him. The poem isn’t known to have gone to anyone besides Higginson. She didn’t even retain a copy.
These treatments of staleness and freshness have much to say about Dickinson’s sense of herself and the point she had reached. Even more revealing are the first-person retrospections she began composing for the first time since 1865. *141 One of these, on her survival, sees her history as a special case not to be explained, and for which she takes no credit:
Somehow myself survived the Night
And entered with the Day –
That it be saved the Saved suffice
Without the Formula –
Henceforth I take my living place
As one commuted led –
A Candidate for Morning Chance
But dated with the Dead.
Fr1209
The speaker feels like Lazarus raised from the tomb, or Gertrude Vanderbilt. Yet she doesn’t claim to have recovered her youth, and in fact the poem lacks the abandon of earlier work.
Another treatment of her inner history seems to make light of old dreams and disappointments:
I worked for chaff and earning Wheat
Was haughty and betrayed . . .
I tasted Wheat and hated Chaff
And thanked the ample friend –
Wisdom is more becoming viewed
At distance than at hand.
Fr1217
In the last two lines, we learn what the brook should have said in reply to the sea’s invitation to “Come now!” “Art thou the thing I wanted?” begins another poem, as if confronted by an eligible lover or a case of gratified desire. The answer, trenchant and amusing, suggests that the author, now in her early forties, saw herself as beyond all that:
Begone – my Tooth has grown –
Supply the minor Palate
That has not starved so long . . .
Fr1311A
But erotic love was not that dismissable. About 1871, recalling her dormant attachment to her distant lover, the poet once again felt that she could give almost anything to have the “right” to be with this person, whose “Magic,” operating passively (without his active will), had awakened her:
Somewhere opon the general Earth
Itself exist Today –
The Magic passive but extant
That consecrated me –
Indifferent Seasons doubtless play
Where I for right to be –
Would pay each Atom that I am
But Immortality –
Reserving that but just to prove
Another Date of Thee –
Oh God of Width, do not for us
Curtail Eternity!
Fr1226
The last lines’ sudden prayer, acknowledging the deity’s fondness for huge expanses of space and time, shows a sudden anxiety about eternity: what if God proves stingy there?
This is the last roughly datable work in which Dickinson seems to anticipate a heavenly reunion with her lover. In all her other first-person retrospective poems of the 1870s, she drew a firm line between past and present, as if to take a stand on the gains of maturity. In one of the most revealing of these backward glances, she reflected on her combined misery and heroism of the early 1860s:
I should not dare to be so sad
So many Years again –
A Load is first impossible
When we have put it down –
The Superhuman then withdraws
And we who never saw
The Giant at the other side
Begin to perish now.
Fr1233
“Sad” may be the simplest and least pretentious of words she could have chosen for the “secret sorrow” that had formerly obsessed her. What she now sees is that that sadness was willed or chosen—was something she dared to feel, and which called up a strength that in retrospect looks superhuman. For this she takes no credit, however, supposing that the unseen giant who helped her carry the load must have come from “the other side.”
Long after her death, the poet’s niece recalled that Austin “never liked and would not even hear those of her poems sent over to my mother that were sad or suggested anything of the kind.” Not only that, but as the niece grew up she was steered away from “solitude and introspection. . . . There were to be no more solitary poets in his family.” Such memories disclose the kinds of fraternal censorship to which the poet had to accommodate herself. It did take courage—and distance—to be sad.
Poems About Memory
In 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote two essays for The Woman’s Journal (the organ of the American Woman Suffrage Organization), “The Door Unlatched” and “The Gate Unlatched.” The first of these began with the story about the Irishman who paid the priests to get his brother out of purgatory. When he asked about his brother’s progress and was told that the praying “had got the door unlatched,” he put “the rest of the money in his pocket, remarking that if Tim was the boy he used to be he would do the rest himself.” Higginson’s point was that the door to women’s freedom was “plainly unlatching,” and that the great reform was now inevitable. Even Dr. Holland’s novels, “written expressly to demolish it, helped it.” Some months later Dickinson asked the author about an article of his, something “about a ‘Latch.’” When Higginson failed to make the connection, she tried again in a letter that may not have been sent: “Is there a magazine c
alled the ‘Woman’s Journal’? I think it was said to be in that – a Gate, or Door, or Latch.”
Nothing conveys a better sense of the stage Dickinson had reached than her poems on memory featuring gates, doors, and latches that must be kept closed. As if answering Higginson’s challenge, she came back to the topic again and again in the first half of the 1870s. *142 Frequently drawing on the machinery of Gothic romance, her poems treat memory as a place best avoided—a long-abandoned house, a closet that had better not be dusted or swept, a cellar not to be opened lest something “in its Fathoms” be roused to pursuit:
Remembrance has a Rear and Front.
’Tis something like a House –
It has a Garret also
For Refuse and the Mouse –
Besides the deepest Cellar
That ever Mason laid –
Look to it by its Fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued –
Fr1234D
The single most dramatic treatment of this material, “I years had been from home,” recorded in 1862, shows the speaker approaching a former domicile with a pressing question:
My Business – just a Life I left –
Was such – still dwelling there?
Fr440A
She stands at the door for several stanzas, on the verge of knocking and entering but paralyzed to act, grasping the latch “With trembling Care” lest the door spring open and she be left “in the Floor.” In the end she turns and flees “gasping,” her question unanswered. Ten years later, when Dickinson was writing her cycle of poems about the fearsome house of memory, she opened the manuscript book containing this narrative and revised it—the only pre-1865 poem she is thought to have reworked in 1872. Clearly, the time had come, if not to face the past, at least to think about the mind’s avoidance of it.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 55
