My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 18

  The Motions of The Dipping Birds –

  The Morning’s Amber Road –

  For mine – to look at when I liked –

  The News would strike me dead –

  So safer Guess –

  With just my soul opon the Window pane –

  Where other Creatures put their eyes –

  Incautious – of the Sun –

  Fr336A

  As Dickinson gradually restricted herself to her father’s house and yard, the plants, birds, insects, and surrounding hills that she had closely observed became increasingly symbolic. They announced the seasons, and the seasons came to be emblems of the phases of psychic existence. In this and other ways, the poet turned from nature and the outdoors to the conservatory of the imagination.

  Composition

  What is true of Emily’s herbarium is truer yet for her early letters and schoolroom essays: she threw herself with such zest into an endeavor governed by standardized expectations that correspondents, schoolmates, and teachers were left in the dust.

  The attentiveness to language that Emily had exhibited at two and a half was a lavishly exercised gift for writing by her early teens. The eleven long letters she sent Abiah Root from 1845 to early 1847, the only surviving compositions of the period (it is thanks to Mabel Loomis Todd that we have them), give evidence of a huge delight in the act of expression.

  Having a taste for mimicry, the poet-to-be loved to admit other voices into her prose, seemingly on the spur of the moment. Once, at fourteen, as she noted with envy and derision that an older girl was about to complete her preparation to teach, the familiar preceptorial formulas used in recitation suddenly made themselves heard: “[Jane Gridley] has nearly gained the summit and we are plodding along on foot after her. Well said and sufficient this.” She loved to purloin the formal dignities of adult speech, then quickly resume a schoolgirl voice. Here she is answering Abiah’s request for news:

  In the first place, Mrs Jones and Mrs S[amuel Ely] Mack have both of them a little daughter. Very promising Children I understand. I dont doubt if they live they will be ornaments to society. I think they are both to be considered as Embryos of future usefullness[.] Mrs. Washburn. Mack has now two grand daughters. Isnt she to be envied.

  Adopting the plummy complacent tones of a matronly gossip, Emily veils yet hints at her own more distant feelings. Mrs. Harriet Washburn Mack, daughter of the Reverend David Parsons, had been married to the late Reverend Royal Washburn and was now the wife of General (and Deacon) David Mack. She must have had a stately presence, judging from the impressive pauses Emily inserted into her name on another occasion: “Mrs! Deacon! Washburn! Mack!”

  What Emily had to say about formal correctness points to the social attitudes underlying this stylistic freedom. “Are the teachers as pleasant as our old school teachers,” she wondered after Abiah left Amherst Academy. “I expect you have a great many prim, starched up young ladys there, who I doubt not are perfect models of propriety & good behavior.”

  But there were times when the girl tried to lose her edgy voice in the hum of approved phrases and sentiments. After Abiah sent a New Year’s letter full of the usual admonitions, Emily made an attempt to respond in kind, then gave it up:

  Your soliloquy on the year that is past and gone was not unheeded by me. Would that we might spend the year which is now fleeting so swiftly by to better advantage than the one which we have not the power to recall. Now I know you will laugh and say I wonder what makes Emily so sentimental.

  Here she regained her balance. Elsewhere she sometimes lost it, particularly when overcome by florid revival rhetoric:

  I hope the golden opportunity is not far hence when my heart will willingly yield itself to Christ, and that my sins will be all blotted out of the book of remembrance. Perhaps before the close of the year now swiftly upon the wing, some one of our number will be summoned to the Judgment Seat above, and I hope we may not be separated when the final decision is made, for how sad would it be for one of our number to go to the dark realms of wo.

  The oddity here (and there are similar passages in other letters of the 1840s) is the split between speaker and sentiment. The speaker says she is unsaved but her ideas and rhetorical moves are those of a perfectly assured minister, not a struggling soul. Profoundly confused, the passage shows the great danger of growing up too quickly: the girl was open to the most invasive and manipulative practices of the day. And suddenly we realize why an impudent and unredeemable childishness came to be an intermittent feature of Dickinson’s free adult voice: she had to go back and become the bad girl she hadn’t been.

  In poetry, Emily’s early tastes were hardly unconventional. She liked to quote from memory Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a long, reflective poem in blank verse and her father’s favorite: “We take no note of Time, but from its loss.” She asked Abiah whether she had seen “a beautiful piece of poetry which has been going through the papers lately? Are we almost there? *38 is the title of it.” But she could also be satirical: “I would love to send you a Boquet if I had an opportunity, and you could press it and write under it, The last flowers of summer. Wouldnt it be poetical, and you know that is what young ladys aim to be now a days.”

  The girl’s trip-wire nerves are suggested by an episode Emily Fowler observed. It seems the poet James Russell Lowell “was especially dear to us, and once I saw a passionate fit of crying brought on [in Dickinson], when a tutor of the College [Henry M. Spofford] . . . told us from his eight years of seniority, that ‘Byron had a much better style,’” and advised us “to leave Lowell, Motherwell and Emerson alone.” The argument must have taken place during Spofford’s tutorship from fall 1842 to December 1844. Though we may doubt that Emily was reading Emerson at the time, there is no reason to question the fact of her crying. She had a strong will, and to have it overborne by complacent male authority rendered intolerable the sense of weakness.

  However, it was prose composition, not poetry, that most interested Emily in her academy years. Like pressed flowers, “papers” were exchanged within her circle of friends, one of the sought-after accolades being “exceedingly witty.” She once justified her delay in answering by saying that a hastily composed letter would be “no smarter than anybody else, and you know I hate to be common.” Edward had prodded his gifted daughter to be the best little girl in Amherst, and the desire to shine, to stand out and be admired, had become a vital spur. Fifty years later, Daniel T. Fiske still remembered the envy her “strikingly original” compositions aroused.

  Amherst Academy stimulated Emily’s ambition by turning essay writing into a public contest. “Only think,” a girl pupil wrote in 1838, “my name has come first on the composition list.” Looking back at Dickinson as “one of the wits of the school,” Emily Fowler remembered being impressed by her “irresistible” contributions to Forest Leaves, an occasional collection put out by the more talented girls. Each issue was “in script, and was passed around the school, where the contributions were easily recognized from the handwriting, which in Emily’s case was very beautiful—small, clear, and finished.” Fanny E. Montague, the student Fowler remembered as doing the pen-and-ink drawings for these compilations, attended Amherst Academy in 1841–1842 and then transferred to the Pittsfield Young Ladies’ Institute. Thus, Emily may have been as young as ten or eleven when she gained a name for her written compositions. *39 And not just for written, if there is anything in another schoolmate’s testimony that she “was always surrounded by a group of girls at recess, to hear her strange and intensely funny stories, invented upon the spot.”

  In sum, Emily gained a local reputation for the finesse, the unexpectedly droll turns, and the brilliant resourcefulness of her word spinning. That she was well aware of her early eminence is clear from her “gasping” admission while studying for exams—her fear that she would “lose my character” if she didn’t answer everything to perfection. But the fear was outweighed by the dawning sense of genius—the realization
that her capacities were far above the ordinary.

  In her early thirties she recalled this exalting and clarifying discovery in one of her most revelatory poems:

  It was given to me by the Gods –

  When I was a little Girl –

  They give us Presents most – you know –

  When we are new – and small.

  I kept it in my Hand –

  I never put it down –

  I did not dare to eat – or sleep –

  For fear it would be gone –

  I heard such words as “Rich” –

  When hurrying to school –

  From lips at Corners of the Streets –

  And wrestled with a smile.

  Rich! ’Twas Myself – was rich –

  To take the name of Gold –

  And Gold to own – in solid Bars –

  The Difference – made me bold –

  Fr455

  The gold she remembers glorying in recalls her most conspicuous feature, red hair, which she described at age fourteen as “golden tresses.” Since the letter containing this phrase says she has “grown tall a good deal,” has “altered a good deal,” it may be that gold also stands for her dawning womanhood. But most of all, gold is the prodigious inner wealth she now understands is hers. She realizes she has been given something of supreme value that sets her apart from others. “Thine is the power” is the message from the gods, and her fellow townsmen standing on the corners know it. She stands out; she is an admired and envied prodigy. The recognition is communal, and, though it does not amount as yet to an authentic calling, it gives the shy and serious (but fun-loving) girl the courage to be bold.

  The poem, one of many by Dickinson on moments of bliss, is about her first glorious intimation that she had genius and could take the name of gold if she was daring enough. But how much boldness will a girl need if her religion mandates submission and her loved father believes in the inferiority of women’s intellectual powers and has no use for public literary females?

  Chapter 9

  Death and Friendship

  Intimate Communion with Another

  “The child’s faith is new” (Fr701), a poem Dickinson wrote in her early thirties, when she could feel that her innocence was finally gone, concerns the childish assumption that paradise is attainable in a very mundane world. Behind the poem was her memory of the very great risks she had taken as a girl, when her precocious ability in approved endeavors and her responsiveness to what was set before her as vital and ultimate, especially in evangelical religion, exposed her to major inner trouble. Like Icarus, she aimed for the sun as soon as she could fly. Like his father, Daedalus, she contrived to save herself, preserving her early idealism through substitutes and compensations, postponing the crash till age thirty. Still, even this most resourceful of children was not prepared for her first season of death.

  In 1846 Emily confided to a friend that as a younger girl she briefly and mistakenly believed she had found salvation. “I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness,” she wrote, “as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior.” Looking back, she felt that those “few short moments . . . I would not now exchange for a thousand worlds like this. It was then my greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers.”

  Little is known about this false conversion other than that Emily’s prayers soon ceased to be a spontaneous pleasure and she began avoiding the small prayer circle she had joined. The existence of this group tells us the experience coincided with one of the periodical revivals that shook the First Church under the Reverend Aaron M. Colton. If we knew the year, we might be able to integrate the episode with other aspects of her life as a child. It may be that the friends who “reasoned with me & told me of the danger I was in of grieving away the Holy spirit of God” were members of this circle.

  This brief taste of perfect joy, peace, and communion with God had divided results. It established an absolute scale by which to measure all later experience, in that way confirming the child’s exalted expectations. But it also made her wary of all solicitations to surrender and of her own quick responsiveness. In 1845 there was a powerful revival in her church that affected many young people and resulted in forty-six confessions of faith that year. This time she stayed away from the daily meetings, fearing she “was so easily excited that I might again be deceived.” Many talked to her in private, and she was “almost inclined to yeild.” *40 She had no doubt she would be wise to do so: “There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill. . . . I continually hear Christ saying to me Daughter give me thine heart.”

  Until about 1850 Dickinson accepted the evangelical system pretty much on its own terms, seeing herself as not only in need of regeneration but liable at any moment to die and thus to miss out on heaven, the one thing worth living for. She resembled her father in this, both withholding themselves without excuse from the inner act they believed they had to perform. Growing up on the edge in this way, the girl was not well armed for the deaths that suddenly fell thick and fast on all sides of the Dickinson household.

  The Deepening Menace

  In 1882, after Dickinson’s mother and father were dead, she noted that “no Verse in the Bible has frightened me so much from a Child as ‘from him that hath not, shall be taken even that he hath.’ Was it because its dark menace deepened our own Door?”

  At first glance, these words seem to indicate an immediate fear for the members of her family, an anxiety stemming from her parents’ extreme protectiveness. No doubt the girl felt that, yet we should note that the Bible verse could not have applied to the Dickinsons, who suffered no bereavements: none of them was “taken.” In fact, the verb is “deepened,” not “darkened”—a hint that death was outside the home and that it was others’ losses that gave Emily a scared sense of living behind a well-fortified door. To look out and see how catching death proved was to experience a peculiar fear in one’s protected state.

  Since Amherst’s burial ground was behind the Dickinsons’ home on West Street, death deepened the young poet’s windows as well as her doors and gates. Once, as she sat writing a friend, she broke her flow of thought to say, “I have just seen a funeral procession go by of a negro baby.” Still, the casualness with which she mentioned this and other interments shows they were an aspect of community life for her, something she took for granted much as anyone else. She was not Mark Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford, composing a lugubrious tribute whenever anyone died.

  But of course some deaths struck nearer than others. On May 19, 1842, Lavinia and Loring Norcross lost their first child, a four-year-old girl, probably in Boston. Since the surviving letters from that spring predate the death, we know nothing about its attendant circumstances. Given the family’s close ties to the Dickinsons, however, we can take for granted it was deeply felt on West Street.

  At the time, careful attention was paid to last words and acts, especially in orthodox communities like Amherst. In fall 1842, after Emily Fowler’s small brother died of a fever, his desolated mother sent a friend a detailed account of his last delirium. The boy had been convinced he “was in a deep well & always away from his pleasant home & dear parents.” When given a glass of water, he thought it “was a hatchet uplifted to destroy him.” At the end, when he was unable to speak and even to “see us,” his tortured mother made one last effort to break through: “if Webster loves his mother press her hand.” And he was just able to do so. One would like to know whether this striking deathbed story was communicated to young Emily.

  “People always are dying here,” wrote Mary Shepard in September 1843, expressing the strong sense of mortality that oppressed Amherst’s inhabitants at the time. But 1843 was nothing compared to the first half of 1844, when a series of deaths made a dramatic impression on the town and precipitated the poet’s most serious childhood crisis.

  Deborah Fiske, the gifted and vibrant wife
of a professor, was remembered as one who greeted children “with a kind remark always.” A victim of consumption, she had a “deep and hoarse” cough, weighed seventy-nine pounds by August 1843, and, aware that she was dying, kept her older daughter, Helen [Hunt Jackson], home from school. Anxious about her younger daughter, Ann, who had lost weight from illness, despondency, and loneliness, she counted on giving the nine-year-old a cheerful birthday party on December 25. Instead, she had to send a peremptory last-minute request to Emily Norcross Dickinson: “If convenient to you, Ann may visit Emily and Lavinia this afternoon . . . I had intended to let her invite your daughters and two or three other misses . . . but I am too feeble to [hear? bear?] any noise of playing.”

  Emily probably attended Mrs. Fiske’s funeral on February 21, 1844, and heard the sermon delivered by Heman Humphrey, president of the college. Sharing the general admiration of the deceased, he took as his theme the importance of the “domestic virtues” in wives and mothers. At the end, as was the custom, he solemnly drew attention to the various classes of survivors, particularly “the bereaved children,” whose “loss is far greater than they can at present realize.” No one is quite so pitiable, he grimly stated, as the child “who has not enjoyed the earliest teaching, as well as caresses of a pious and faithful mother. The loss cannot be repaired.” As if to qualify this dark forecast, he invoked the dead woman’s spirit as his unseen listener: “I seem at this moment to see her finger upon her lips, warning me that my words should be few, and carefully chosen. I stand before God; in what other invisible presences I know not.” Even if Emily missed this tremendous ghostly scene, in which choosing the right words carried so much weight, she could have read the published text after the widower presented it to her mother.