Another poem, “These are the days when Birds come back—” (titled “October”), appeared in Drum Beat’s pages and recollects the final paragraphs in Higginson’s essay “The Life of Birds.” But whereas Higginson ends his essay with his typical cheer about seasonal rebirth, Dickinson’s autumnal poem about birds’ taking a backward look in fall ends with a plea that, in this context, we may read as addressing him: “Oh sacrament of summer days, / Oh Last Communion in the Haze—/ Permit a child to join—/ Thy sacred emblems to partake—/ Thy consecrated bread to take / And thine immortal wine!”
Perhaps she idly wondered if Higginson would come across her poem. Nor were these the only poems he might recognize as hers. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” appeared in Round Table, another newly established paper in New York edited by another Amherst graduate, the Dickinson cousin Charles Sweetser, and “Success—is counted sweetest” turned up in April in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. These two poems had also been given to Higginson; likely he praised them, and clearly she thought they represented her well.
The timing of their appearance is suggestive particularly since Dickinson rarely published before the war or after it. “If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—,” we recall her telling Higginson; “if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me—then—My Barefoot-Rank is better—.” Fame, ersatz celebrity, immortality, and the hollow heart of laurels—the renunciation of worldly prizes—and their allure—ricochet through her poems: “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate,” she impishly wrote, or in another fragment, “Fame is a bee. / It has a song—/ It has a sting—/ Ah, too, it has a wing,” or yet again, “Fame’s Boys and Girls, who never die / And are too seldom born—.” Or, during the war, “Some—Work for Immortality—/ ,” she noted, “The Chiefer part, for Time—/ He—Compensates—immediately—/ The former—Checks—on Fame—/ Slow Gold—but Everlasting—.” She chose the slow gold, but it was a choice, and choices imply attractive alternatives, or we would not have to bother choosing.
Perhaps, then, war relaxed her ambivalence toward publication; a public cause is easier to rationalize than a private one, and publication, in this instance, is philanthropy as much as self-aggrandizement. She would not seek fame or shirk it, she had said, concealing her motives not from Higginson as much as from herself. It was what he did too, refusing to jockey for a promotion, pretending it did not matter.
But her published war poetry was not like Whitman’s or Whittier’s or Herman Melville’s. Not intensely personal, specifically topical, or formidably obscure, it revealed her talent without unveiling her soul. In the privacy of her room, however, she spoke more openly of the war. “When I was small, a Woman died—/ ,” she wrote around 1863, “Today—her Only Boy / Went up from the Potomac—/ His face all Victory.” The apparition of these faces, of woman and of boy, passes “back and forth, before my Brain.” Who is not harassed by war? Similarly, in “Bereavement in their death to feel / ,” she writes of “Whom We have never seen—/ A Vital Kinsmanship import / Our Soul and their’s between—.” And war stands for battle within: “The Battle fought between the Soul / And No Man—is the One / Of all the Battles prevalent—/ By far the Greater One—.” Yet war remains itself, grim with a death and dying so appalling that it exhilarates: “It sets the Fright at liberty—/ And Terror’s free—/ Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!” Fascination is absolute of clime.
What of slavery? of abolition? She does not really say. Or if she confronts the subject head-on, the result is far more conventional than her usual verse: “No Rack can torture me—/ My Soul—at Liberty—.” Possibly she refers to emancipated slaves when she wonders,
Can the Lark resume the Shell—
Easier—for the Sky—
Would’nt Bonds hurt more
Than Yesterday?
Would’nt Dungeons sorer grate
On the Man—free—
Just long enough to taste—
Then—doomed new—
God of the Manacle
As of the Free—
Take not my Liberty
Away from Me—
(This poem reflects Higginson’s remark that “you may make a soldier out of a slave, very readily; but you can no more make a slave out of a soldier than you can replace a bird in the egg.”) And when she envisions soldiers marching in the distance, she may well be picturing Higginson’s regiment in the bright red trousers he loathed:
A Slash of Blue! A sweep of Gray!
Some scarlet patches—on the way—
Compose an evening sky—
A little Purple—slipped between—
Some Ruby Trowsers—hurried on—
A Wave of Gold—a Bank of Day—
This just makes out the morning sky!
Working best when pushing metaphor into new places, she insists again that “Publication—is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—,” though in this case she may be associating the merchandising of consciousness with the horrific trade in human beings: “In the Parcel—Be the Merchant / Of the Heavenly Grace—/ But reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price—.” One’s self was not for sale. “I do not let go it,” she told Higginson, “because it is mine.” Likely she referred to her poetry.
And of the young soldier, eager to die, and enamored of fame in the form of victory, she thus compassionately if somberly notes:
He fought like those Who’ve nought to lose—
….….
But Death was Coy of Him
As Other Men, were Coy of Death.
To Him—to live—was Doom—
His Comrades, shifted like the Flakes
When Gusts reverse the Snow—
But He—was left alive Because
Of Greediness to die—
So many men, so much death. Romanticized by the green and the young, vainglorious death is yet the subject of another poem:
My Portion is Defeat—today—
A paler luck than Victory—
Less Paeans—fewer Bells—
The Drums dont follow Me—with tunes—
Defeat—a somewhat slower—means—
More Arduous than Balls—
’Tis populous with Bone and stain—
And Men too straight to stoop again—
And Piles of solid Moan—
And Chips of Blank—in Boyish Eyes—
And scraps of Prayer—
And Death’s surprise,
Stamped visible—in stone—
There’s somewhat prouder, Over there—
The Trumpets tell it to the Air—
How different Victory
To Him who has it—and the One
Who to have had it, would have been
Contenteder—to die—
The poet, whose “Portion is Defeat,” pretends to envy those who march off to war, trumpets blaring, drums banging, bells ringing with praise. And yet the poem is funereal, particularly in the second stanza, where the repeating “And” creates an implacable rhythm of accumulating brutal images: “Chips of Blank—in Boyish Eyes—,” “Piles of solid Moan—,” “Stamped visible—in stone—” (on a headstone). These images drive the poem toward its paradoxical conclusion: the trumpets broadcast victory that no one hears, for only to the victor does victory have meaning, one that lies, ironically, in death. As for the rest of us, we live among unheralded defeats, which are, of course, their own kind of victory: life.
“COULD YOU, WITH HONOR, AVOID DEATH,” Dickinson entreated Colonel Higginson, her new friend, capitalizing “Death” and not “honor.” To her there was no honor in death, and yet she knew, as she also told him—enfolding a two-line poem within the context of her letter—that we measure gain by loss, just as we measure success by failure:
Best Gains—must have the Losses’ test—
To constitute them—Gains.
She would miss him, in other words, but she respected his decision to fight and included in anot
her letter a poem—replete with martial images—about dedication, loyalty, individual autonomy, and courage:
The Soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend
Or the most agonizing Spy
An Enemy could send
Secure against it’s own
No treason it can fear
Itself it’s Sovereign of itself
The Soul should be in Awe
We need courage because we are self-divided, and thus the single indomitable soul is its own worst enemy (“agonizing Spy”). But when “Secure against it’s own,” nothing can harm it. A farewell to Higginson of astonishing insight, it is as if she knew of his vacillations, his indecision, his conflicts. She folded the poem into her letter and bade him much more than well.
In camp, when the mail arrived, he sought out her handwriting.
IN JUNE 1863, the month before Higginson was wounded, James Fields published a book of the colonel’s Atlantic essays—omitting those about slave rebellions, presumably slated for a different collection, which struck Fields as seditious. No matter: Higginson proudly showed off Out-Door Papers to all his junior officers and crowed over the good reviews. The Springfield Republican went so far as to compare Higginson’s euphonious style with Hawthorne’s.
Dickinson herself never forgot the day she first opened Higginson’s book. “It is still as distinct as Paradise—,” she would tell him years hence. “It was Mansions—Nations—Kinsmen—too—to me—.” Refined and sharpened, his images seeped into her imagination, and she used his writing, as she did that of the Bible and Shakespeare, in her own, ingesting its metaphors or rhythm and trimming his fat. Take his description of rowing on Lake Quinsigamond just before dawn so he can see the water lilies at first light: “Precisely at half past three, a song-sparrow above our heads gave one liquid trill, so inexpressibly sudden and delicious, that it seemed to set to music every atom of freshness and fragrance that Nature held; then the spell was broken, and the whole shore and lake were vocal with song.” Dickinson rewrites it this way:
The Birds begun at Four o’clock—
Their period for Dawn—
A Music numerous as space—
But neighboring as Noon—
….….
The Witnesses were not—
Except Occasional Man—
In homely industry arrayed—
To overtake the Morn—
Or in another poem, composed later, she again borrows from Higginson:
At Half past Three
A Single Bird
Unto a silent sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious Melody.
At Half past Four
Experiment had subjugated test
And lo, her silver principle
Supplanted all the rest.
At Half past Seven
Element nor implement be seen
And Place was where the Presence was
Circumference between
A dense poem, it traces the appearance and disappearance of the solitary bird, which after propounding its single note of melody, will disappear—as Dickinson, fugitive poet, does. But the bird and its song echo in the memory of the implied listener, which may be the definition, for her, of circumference: the liminal border between presence and absence. Or as Higginson explains in his essay “Water-Lilies,” “that which is remembered is often more vivid than that which is seen. The eye paints better in the presence, the heart in the absence, of the object most dear.” Our imagination, like memory, nourishes us long after his beloved water lily disappears: “only in losing her do we gain the power to describe her,” he concludes, “and we are introduced to Art, as we are to Eternity, by the dropping away of our companions.”
Written before the war, when printed in Out-Door Papers, “Water-Lilies” takes on a special elegiac tone, as if forecasting Higginson’s future. “Absence is the very air of passion, and all the best description is in memoriam,” Higginson writes. “As with our human beloved, when the graceful presence is with us, we cannot analyze or describe, but merely possess, and only after its departure can it be portrayed by our yearning desires; so is it with Nature.” Soon he would embark on the memorial series about Harvard men slain during the Civil War, and much of his writing would acquire a retrospective, subdued quality, an amethyst’s remembrance, as Dickinson would say. But his notion of the lost being recovered through imagination was no nostalgic romanticism. Rather, for him imagination was intimately connected to an imperturbable nature, immanent and benign. “No man can measure what a single hour with Nature may have contributed to the moulding of his mind,” Higginson wrote. “The influence is self-renewing, and if for a long time it baffles expression by reason of its fineness, so much the better in the end.” This Emersonian notion was his form of worship—and in certain hours, Dickinson’s too. “I was thinking, today—as I noticed, that the ‘Supernatural,’ was only the Natural, disclosed—,” she told him.
Yet unlike Higginson, Dickinson teetered between belief and unbelief. For her, souls seldom touch their objects, as Emerson had written in “Experience,” and defy our meager attempt to make sense of them. (“Perception of an Object costs / ,” she writes, “Precise the Object’s loss—.”) But disappointment does not deter her. Rather, she seizes the ephemeral in nature—in human nature—through art, tracing what she called “The Myrrhs, and Mochas, of the Mind.” That is, while Higginson staked his life on a meaning latent in the world, Dickinson created that meaning. To her, perception was a matter of probing, whatever the cost, into what Melville had called the very axis of reality, the Pit; as she said, “Heaven over it—/ And Heaven beside, and Heaven abroad; / And yet a Pit—.” Poetry recorded what, if anything, she found there: “The Zeros taught Us—Phosphorus.”
But Higginson had faith, at bottom, in inalienable human rights, and it spurred him to fight for equality, justice, a heaven on earth; whether he would be successful was another matter. And of the two of them, Higginson and Dickinson, he would suffer more disillusionment, although paradoxically it made him a meliorist, his faith firmly placed in the future. But with an imagination at once more alienated and more free, Dickinson stayed angry, witty, agnostic, pantheistic, madcap—although committed, as he was, to the salutary power of art. In an early letter to Higginson, sent in July 1863, when she enclosed the poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—,” she suggested we seek what is with us always:
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—
I’m going, all along.
DICKINSON HAD NOT KNOWN that Colonel Higginson had been wounded in the summer, as she explained, because she had taken ill that September and then went to Boston the following spring to consult with the eminent ophthalmologist Henry Willard Williams of Arlington Street. Something was wrong with her eyes. She could not bear light. “The snow-light offends them,” she told her cousin, “and the house is bright.” Reading was difficult, if not impossible. “What I see not, I better see—/ Through Faith—,” she reassured herself, “My Hazel Eye / Has periods of shutting—/ But, No lid has Memory—.”
The diagnosis for her condition seems to have been rheumatic iritis (anterior uveitis), a disease that comes and goes and whose prognosis is good. An irritation in the iris, possibly congenital, that causes pain, soreness, light sensitivity, and blurred vision, the condition is often associated with diabetes; in Dickinson’s case, its onset and causes are unknown.
During the course of her treatment, she stayed with Norcross cousins Louise and Frances in a boardinghouse at 86 Austin Street in Cambridgeport. She answered Higginson’s note, forwarded to her there, saying her doctor would not let her go back to Amherst, “yet I work in my Prison, and make Guests for myself—.” But the restless bustle of urban life—and her anxiety, her inactivity, her ailment—depressed her. Perhaps she could manage to write her poetry, though the physician had advised against sewing and reading. “I wish to see you more than before I failed—,” she lamente
d to Higginson, her language drastic and similar to that of the poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” possibly composed around this time:
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
Unaware that he had been injured, she also did not know much about his recovery, she said, but word of it would “excel” her own. That was overstatement. Her eye trouble, Higginson’s wound, even Hawthorne’s sudden death (which she mentioned to Higginson) spelled the end of an era. She was cut off. “The only News I know / ,” she told him with bleak humor, “Is Bulletins all day / From Immortality.”
Not until the end of November could she go home, long after the apples had ripened and wild geese, heading south, had darkened the sky. And yet with her eyes not fully healed, she had to return to Boston in the spring and summer of 1865, just at the time the savage war finally ended. Years later she remembered her own private ordeal as “a Calamity,” which no doubt it was. Writing to Joseph Lyman, she recalled that “I had a woe, the only one that ever made me tremble. It was a shutting out of all the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul—BOOKS. The medical man said avaunt ye books tormentors, he also said ‘down, thoughts, & plunge into her soul.’ He might as well have said, ‘Eyes be blind’, ‘heart be still’. So I had eight weary months of Siberia.”
White Heat Page 17
