Three

I’VE BEEN IN THE HABIT MYSELF OF WRITING SOME FEW THINGS

Friday, February 20, 1852 2 p.m. Thermometer 18.2 degrees. Barometer mean 30.38b. Wind NW 2. Humidity 44. Cloudiness 0. Snow 0. Remarks: Clear and pretty cold. Faint Streamers.

—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

The family cat had been missing for a month, and in its absence Emily became the house mouser. She traps one a night, Vinnie boasted.¹ Even when it came to rodents, Vinnie was proud of her sister’s accomplishments. Now that Emily had permanently returned from Mount Holyoke, her life revolved around the Dickinsons’ home with all its attendant comforts, duties, and grievances. When Emily informed Abiah she would not be returning to the seminary, she said the decision was her father’s.² The statement was true, partially. As the presumed head of the household, Edward Dickinson rendered most of the judgments for the family, but Emily was coy about what was or was not her choice. Routinely she suggested that others made decisions for her or actions simply happened or evolved by default. Other times she remained mute about personal accomplishments that others would have bragged about. It became increasingly difficult to discern what she chose to do and what she appeared to have no hand in. She was growing intentionally furtive, indiscernible, and tight-lipped about owning up to her decisions. And she appeared to acquiesce easily to her father’s determinations—perhaps too easily. In truth, nothing about twenty-one-year-old Emily Dickinson was easy or apparent. Implying the Mount Holyoke decision was her father’s alone said as much about Emily’s silence as it did Edward Dickinson’s dominance. It was not that Emily was capricious or believed she was not entitled to her own point of view. Rather, she did not want to be found out. She preferred being imperceptible. It was as though Emily wanted to set the trap, but be nowhere in sight when it snapped.

The decision not to return to Mount Holyoke was understood. Emily wanted to stay in Amherst, and teaching already had been ruled out. When she looked around, she saw young people her age finding work, leaving town, and establishing their independence. Cousin Emily was teaching in Ohio. Austin had graduated from Amherst College and was teaching in Boston. Her friend Jane Humphrey had accepted a school post in the Midwest. “Why so far,” Emily asked. “Was’nt there room enough for that young ambition, among New England hills?”³ Everyone seemed to be moving, Emily said—implying she was not.⁴ She was especially sad to see Sue Gilbert leave. She had grown close to Sue and Mattie Gilbert, who lived in Amherst with their sister and brother-in-law, William Cutler. But, worried about being financially dependent on her sister’s husband, Sue had moved to Baltimore. As a teacher, she earned $125 a year—not much—she admitted, but enough to make a home for herself and be on her own. Perhaps it was more than financial concern that made Sue distance herself from him. William Cutler believed women who worked exposed themselves to sickness and even death, and labeled Sue’s decision to leave “foolish.”⁵ But Sue had enjoyed herself in Maryland—made new friends, took in operas, sampled food she had never tasted before—and so far she had proved Mr. Cutler wrong.⁶ She was, after all, still alive.

Many young men were also no longer around: Amherst College students and former law students who had visited the Dickinsons’ home and showed an interest in Emily. One of them, George Gould—a fraternity brother of Austin’s—had gone west to seek work as an engineer. Everyone liked George’s wit and kindness, and said even shaking hands with him made a person feel better.⁷ Long after George left, Emily kept his invitation to a party—a candy pull.* Two law clerks in her father’s office also had departed Amherst, but not before giving Emily gifts. The young men shared her love of literature: one had given her a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems and the other Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. While Emily had no serious romantic prospects at the time, she often was amused by those who did. She told Austin about one friend who had two admirers pulling weeds out of her flower bed. “That’s romantic, is’nt it,” she joked.⁸ In the winter, the same young woman was with a beau sledding down Boltwood’s Hill. “The very last phase of flirtation,” she quipped.⁹ If teaching were out of the question and marriage not on the horizon—Emily wondered where life would take her. She was ambitious and a clever writer. At least, that’s what her friends and teachers thought. But she didn’t know if others agreed. She would soon find out. Before the day ended, Emily’s first poem would be published. The verse would take a circuitous route passed from friend to acquaintance before finally ending up in the hands of a respected editor. It all started in the most inauspicious way with shenanigans around Valentine’s Day and one of Vinnie’s suitors.

By any measure, Vinnie’s gentleman callers had been plentiful and some ardent. Vinnie had young men come for the afternoon to hear her sing, stop by for pie, and take her riding in a carriage “drawn by six horses”—or so she effused in her diary.¹⁰ One night Emily observed with amusement that a young man took Vinnie to a lecture while she went unescorted and settled for a seat next to Mr. and Mrs. Snell.¹¹ At one point Vinnie had so many callers, she had to stagger them or dodge one while another was coming through the gate. Many narrow escapes, she admitted.¹² William Howland was the most persistent. An 1846 Amherst graduate, he later tutored at the college and studied in Edward Dickinson’s law office. William and Vinnie frequently went walking and rode horseback to a nearby glade. Howland called so often, Vinnie noted he was at the family’s home “again & again.”¹³ His tenacity sometimes annoyed her, or perhaps it was William himself.¹⁴ But when she came back from a visit to Boston, Vinnie had been pleased to see Howland waiting for her. By accepting his invitations, she clearly encouraged him, and one afternoon led to trouble. The two had gone riding far enough away so that no one would see them. Then they exchanged rings. Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson disapproved and—most likely—the incident did not help Howland’s prospects at the Dickinson law office. “Did Vinnie tell you that she went with him to Ware, and how it made a hubbub in the domestic circle?” Emily tattled to her brother.¹⁵ A month later, Vinnie noted in her diary: “Received offer of marriage”—but no other details followed.¹⁶ Emily couldn’t help teasing her father’s law clerks; their earnestness made ribbing them irresistible. When Valentine’s Day came around, she penned a lively poem to William. She assumed he wouldn’t take her words seriously and would enjoy their charm and exaggeration. It was a spoof, after all: merely a way to have fun. Even if her poem was more quick-witted than profound, Emily assured herself that the valentine was for William’s eyes only.

Emily loved Valentine’s Day. Most everyone did. Local townswomen hosted Valentine’s festivals that served up ice cream while residents penned amusing notes that they slid into a mock post office. For weeks, the Adams brothers’ bookshop in Amherst had filled its shelves with embossed lace and flower valentines.¹⁷ Esther Howland, an enterprising young woman who had gone to Mount Holyoke, had been mass producing valentines from her father’s stationery store in Worcester. Initially she’d hoped her brother could rustle up $200 worth of orders, but was astonished when he came home with sales topping $5,000.¹⁸ When it came to valentines, Emily considered herself old-fashioned. She wanted to compose the words herself and not rely on someone else’s sentiments. She used the holiday to scribble poems and long prose declarations bursting with exuberance and made-up words. She also loved the verbal sparring that came with the holiday. When someone shot a humorous volley her way, she welcomed the challenge, and countered with banter as sharp as it was erudite. “A little condescending, & sarcastic, your Valentine to me,” she teased a male cousin, “a little like an Eagle, stooping to salute a Wren, & I concluded once, I dared not answer it, for it seemed to me not quite becoming – in a bird so lowly as myself – to claim admittance to an Eyrie, & conversation with it’s King.”¹⁹ While Emily enjoyed the personal exchange of valentines, one of her fanciful compositions had earlier ended up in a student publication at Amherst College. It happened that a group of young men—some of whom were Austin’s friends—had been scrambling to fill pages of their magazine, the Indicator. George Gould from the candy pull was on the Indicator’s editorial board and had received one of Emily’s delightful valentines. When the pages of the magazine had come up short, George offered Emily’s witty prose piece to fill the gap. “Magnum bonum, ‘harrum scarum’, zounds et zounds, et war alarum, man reformam, life perfectum, mundum changum, all things flarum? Sir, I desire an interview,” she began. Come, she implored, “meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon – the place is immaterial. In gold, or in purple, or sackcloth – I look not upon the raiment. With sword, or with pen, or with plough – the weapons are less than the wielder. . . . Our friendship sir, shall endure till sun and moon shall wane no more. . . . I am Judith the heroine of Apocrypha, and you the orator of Ephesus. That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite. If it was my Carlo now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir. . . . But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We’ll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds – we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega – we will ride up the hill of glory – Hallelujah, all hail!”²⁰

Emily had no idea the valentine would be published. Nor did she tell anyone after it had, even though the headnote written by one of the student editors was flattering. “I wish I knew who the author is,” the editor declared. “I think she must have some spell, by which she quickens the imagination, and causes the high blood ‘run frolic through the veins.’ Yes, the author, of such a gew gaw—such a frenzy built edifice—I should like to know and talk with, for I don’t believe her mouth has any corners, perhaps ‘like a rose leaf torn!’ But I’ll not keep you in the door way longer, but enter the temple, and decipher the thoughts engraved there.”²¹ Discovering her prose had been published made Emily realize that others were interested in her writing, even if they were only Austin’s friends. She must have been relieved to see her name not attached to the work. It made her invisible. Only the curious letter C stood where her name would have been. The initial may have been a reference to Carlo.

For several years now, Emily’s big dog, Carlo, had been her protector and what she called her shaggy ally.²² Edward Dickinson bought the dog—a Newfoundland most people thought—to keep his daughter company. Carlo followed her everywhere and, like most sights and sounds around Emily, he became the object of metaphor—even in a valentine. Emily could hardly get up in the morning without metaphors and images flooding her mind. Often her letters to Austin took on the appearance of a composition exercise, as if she were trying to freeze a moment in words and capture not only the look, but also the feel of an instant. “We have just got home from meeting,” she had written her brother one winter, “it is very windy and cold – the hills from our kitchen window are just crusted with snow, which with their blue mantillas makes them seem so beautiful. . . . Father and mother sit in state in the sitting room perusing such papers only, as they are well assured have nothing carnal in them. Vinnie is eating an apple which makes me think of gold, and accompanying it with her favorite [New York] Observer, which if you recollect, deprives us many a time of her sisterly society. Pussy has’nt returned from the afternoon assembly, so you have us all just as we are at present.”²³ When she wrote to others mentioning, for example, that she had a cold, she could not merely say she was ill. Instead she drafted entire scenes featuring a wild creature that spread disease by pouncing on her shawl, throwing his arms around her neck and kissing her wildly. She even used dialogue. “‘Marm, will [you] tell me the name of this country,” she imagined the beast saying, ‘it’s Asia Minor, is’nt it?”²⁴ Emily also spent considerable time writing in her head and marked passages in books about the role of art in expressing the ineffable.²⁵ When she came across a fine sentence, she shared it with others, and studied how the listeners reacted.²⁶ She reused phrases she had created, sending them to different correspondents for different effect. Some of the words in George Gould’s prose valentine came from an earlier letter to someone else.²⁷ The natural world also fueled her imagination—birds, rivers, daisies, sunrises, mice. Like one of Mary Lyon’s science students, she would study the object before her, registering light, movement, shape, and color, but then slip out of the world of scientific observation and into figurative language. Take snakes, for instance: “I love those little green ones,” Emily had written Abiah, “that slide around by your shoes in the grass – and make it rustle with their elbows.”²⁸ Unlike Vinnie, who kept a diary, or Sue Gilbert, who wrote in a journal, or her old girlhood friend Helen Fiske, who wanted to start a “character book” for recording observations—Emily said she was not the type to formally organize her thoughts.²⁹ Perhaps she didn’t keep a diary or a journal because she didn’t need to. Images never left her. Once she stood in the Amherst rain watching Austin return to Boston. It was not so much the sight of Austin himself that lingered in her mind, but rather the place where he was not. “I watched the stage coach yesterday until it went away,” she had written, “and I hoped you would turn around, so to be sure and see me. . . . I thought you saw me once, the way I told was this. You know your cap was black, and where it had been black, it all at once grew white, and I fancied that was you.”³⁰

Lately Emily was pondering an abstract idea some may have found bizarre. She used one of her wildly imaginative letters to sort out what she was thinking. Surely Uncle Joel Norcross would have realized his niece was writing one of her overblown reprimands for not responding quickly enough to her letters; he had received many of them. But in the final paragraphs, Emily’s prose took a startling turn, moving from the humorously absurd to the violent with talk of stones and daggers and guns. She was trying to get at a belief that was important to her, but it was difficult to understand what she meant. “Harm is one of those things that I always mean to keep clear of,” she had written, “but somehow my intentions and me dont chime as they ought – and people will get hit with stones that I throw at my neighbor’s dogs – not only hit – that is the least of the whole – but they insist upon blaming me instead of the stones – and tell me their heads ache – why it is the greatest piece of folly on record. It would do to go with a story I read – one man pointed a loaded gun at a man – and it shot him so that he died – and the people threw the owner of the gun into prison – and afterwards hung him for murder. Only another victim to the misunderstanding of society . . . Now when I walk into your room and pluck your heart out that you die – I kill you – hang me if you like – but if I stab you while sleeping the dagger’s to blame – it’s no business of mine.”³¹ On the surface, she was making a preposterous claim about accountability: the dagger’s to blame, the loaded gun is at fault, stones hit the neighbor’s dog. But beneath the surface, Emily was trying to understand if writers were responsible for the feelings they prompted in others: if hurling a word had the same effect as throwing a stone. Was imagination—like a loaded gun—the one pulling the trigger?† Emily seemed to say she wanted the freedom to hurl her words without consequences. She did not want to pay a price for daring images or be muzzled into saying only what was acceptable. Invisibility seemed the key for keeping her imagination sovereign. Years later she would remember sitting with her friend Jane in a favorite spot—the big stone step outside the Dickinsons’ front door. She recalled hearing the faraway sound of an ax being brought down long after a farmer had swung it.³² What stayed with her was not the action or the farmer. What remained was the lingering sound. Emily wanted to be like that: heard but not seen.

Austin could not always understand what Emily was saying, and it exasperated him. Austin and Emily’s friend Sue Gilbert had become close, and in one letter, he complained to Sue about Emily’s confounding prose. “I have a sort of land of Canaan letter from Emily yesterday,” he had written, “but she was too high up to give me any of the monuments of earth.”³³ Vinnie also found her sister abstruse and difficult to comprehend. She “has fed you on air so long,” Vinnie told Austin, “that I think a little ‘sound common sense’ perhaps wouldnt come amiss Plain english you know such as Father likes.”³⁴ Writing joint family letters to Austin sometimes prompted sharp contrasts. “Vinnie tells me she has detailed the news,” Emily wrote. “She reserved the deaths for me, thinking I might fall short of my usual letter somewhere.”³⁵ But when Emily heard that her brother and sister were complaining about her writing, she fired back to Austin with humor and hyperbole. “You say you dont comprehend me, you want a simpler style. Gratitude indeed for all my fine philosophy! I strove to be exalted thinking I might reach you and while I pant and struggle and climb the nearest cloud, you walk out very leisurely in your slippers from Empyrean, and without the slightest notice request me to get down!”³⁶

With Valentine’s Day over, the Adams brothers cleared their shelves of Esther Howland’s red and white cards and made way for new books to occupy the shop racks. Vinnie had been reading a book with a personal connection to the family: a biography of Mary Lyon. Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock spent the last two years writing the book in order to pay tribute to the woman he admired. He hoped his words would inspire readers to emulate Miss Lyon’s ambition.³⁷ In 1849—the year after Emily left the seminary—Mary Lyon had become seriously ill. Already ground down by years of work, she had insisted on caring for a student who was battling a serious infection. When the infection spread to Miss Lyon, the erysipelas that had long plagued her returned. A beloved nephew’s suicide may have weakened her physical condition even more. On March 5, 1849, Lyon died at age fifty-two. In accordance with her directions, Mount Holyoke resumed activity a few days later, and as he so often did, Professor Snell came over to help with lectures.³⁸ Behind the sprawling seminary building, trustees worked on a gravestone monument for Mount Holyoke’s founder. Teachers and students had watched as trustees dug postholes for an iron fence surrounding the grave. When shovels proved inadequate, the men dug the dirt with their hands. Receiving the news in Persia, Fidelia Fiske vowed to collect memories of Mary Lyon from former students. “I have nothing that I wanted to do here, except to finish that writing,” she said.³⁹ She recalled the words to a song Miss Lyon once sang at the spinning wheel. “It’s not in the wheel, it’s not in the band,—It’s in the girl who takes it in hand.” ‡⁴⁰

Mary Lyon’s belief that women’s minds deserved to be as active as their hands taught her students there was more to life than housework. In place of spinning flax, a young woman might take up words or metaphor. For Emily, the demands of an active family made housekeeping impossible to escape. Home is a holy thing, she wrote Austin, but her days were far from pleasing.⁴¹ She disliked the drudgery, and begrudged the time it snatched from her writing. There were pies to make and clothing to mend; floors to sweep and seeds to plant; and all those chickens that needed tending. An especially difficult time for Emily had occurred when Vinnie was away at school. Vinnie, like Helen Fiske, attended Ipswich for a short time—the seminary Helen’s father thought was less intellectually taxing than Mount Holyoke. Emily complained to a friend that many of the chores had fallen on her shoulders. “Vinnie away,” she had written, “and my two hands but two – not four, or five as they ought to be – and so many wants – and me so very handy – and my time of so little account – and my writing so very needless.” Emily said that if she took so much as “an inch on time” to write, she would be castigated – not so much by her family as the world and her own guilt.⁴² Housekeeping, to her, was a way to cultivate a woman’s submission and steal time, and she wanted nothing of it. “God keep me from what they call households,” she said.⁴³

The labor around the house was coupled with social calls that annoyed Emily all the more. As much as she often felt regimented by the rigorous schedule at Mount Holyoke, at least then her mind had been occupied. But social convention dictated that when she didn’t have her hands busy with domestic chores, she should be paying calls on the local citizenry or they on her. One Saturday evening after tea, Emily had fallen prey to a steady stream of callers that nearly killed her, she said. Along with their mother in the kitchen, she was cleaning up when there was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen were standing on the stone step asking for Emily. Surprised by the summons, she hurried across the room as her father shouted to the young men not to keep the door wide open. Emily joined the gentlemen outside on the step only to have them—no doubt jolted by Mr. Dickinson’s bark—excuse themselves hastily in the name of pressing business. Then the bell rang again. This time a cousin and another gentleman walked in. Emily sat in the sitting room—more dead than alive, she admitted—and struggled to make conversation. “The weather was rather cold today,” she said, trying to encourage conversation. The gentlemen nodded in obliging unanimity. Frantically, she searched her mind for another topic, and pulled up a stray thought about a recent sermon. As soon as she ventured into the subject, the bell rang again and in trooped another cousin—Thankful Smith “in the furs and robes of her ancestors,” Emily later reported. Trying her best to disappear into what she called a “primeval nothingness,” Emily knew the evening had gotten beyond her control.⁴⁴ It wasn’t every evening that the Dickinson home saw a parade of callers and strained conversation. But when it happened—Emily felt depleted. A “constant interchange wastes tho’t and feeling,” she said, “and we are then obliged to repair and renew.”⁴⁵

The expectation that Emily spend time dusting or calling on neighbors grated on her, and her irritation began to show. That winter when the Sewing Society began its meetings, Emily declined to attend. She knew “the public” would be puzzled by her absence and make her the object of prayers, and she let loose with a torrent of sarcasm. “Now all the poor will be helped – the cold warmed – the warm cooled – the hungry fed – the thirsty attended to – the ragged clothed – and this suffering – tumbled down world will be helped to it’s feet again,” she wrote her friend Jane.⁴⁶ It was an ungenerous and judgmental remark that betrayed her blindness to the misfortune of others, and underscored her own unhappiness. Emily said she loved “to be surly – and muggy – and cross.”⁴⁷ When she didn’t receive replies to her letters fast enough, she became what she called “crusty.”⁴⁸ She slammed doors, called herself one of the lingering bad ones, and disappeared whenever she felt like it. Even Austin said she could be wild. “Savage,” Vinnie said.⁴⁹ Emily admitted people probably saw her as hardhearted, but she had no idea friends gossiped behind her back. Emily is wholly misinterpreted, they said.⁵⁰ She was not the only young woman who felt out of sorts. Her old friend Helen Fiske confessed that her only diversions were reading, writing letters, and practicing piano. With no career and few activities besides housework, she felt adrift. Occasionally Helen went for a walk or varied the routine by “the breaking of a few lamp shades,” she said.⁵¹ Emily knew even unruffled Abiah could be peeved. “Not in one of your breaking dish moods I take it,” she joked.⁵² Sometimes Emily was so overwhelmed with unhappiness, she cried. There were tears over canceled plans, tending her mother when Mrs. Dickinson was ill, and when friends moved away. As she looked ahead, the future looked grim, lonely, and aimless. She was not exactly angry, she said. She was bitter and sad.⁵³ “Duty,” she said, “is black and brown.”⁵⁴

Helen Fiske rarely allowed herself to be downcast, but she had reason to feel unmoored. After her mother’s death, her father died on a visit to the Holy Land. His body was not returned to Amherst, and he had been buried on Mount Zion. For several years, Helen shuttled among relatives and boarding schools. She referred to her wanderings with her usual tart tongue. It was like surviving massacres, she said.⁵⁵ But recently, things had changed for the better. Helen was in Albany and staying with a guardian who discussed Coleridge and Tennyson with her and encouraged literary interests. He suggested she might translate a French essay, and she had tried—setting herself down to write in her mother’s favorite rocking chair.§ But soon social invitations pulled Helen away and she lost her urge to write. She castigated herself for being easily distracted and vowed to do something useful. “I will not let myself be turned into a young lady ‘in society’ who sleeps, goes to parties, receives and returns calls!”⁵⁶ But she did just that. The French translation was never finished, the character book she pledged to keep lay unopened, and she was off to a Christmas ball at the state capitol. There she met the governor’s youngest brother, a recent West Point graduate working for the Army Corps of Engineers. Edward Hunt, she said, “is very tall, very large, very dignified, rather cold in his manner at first, but thaws.”⁵⁷

After Valentine’s Day, a thin layer of February snow covered the ground in Amherst. It had snowed only two inches all month—but since it had been so cold, nothing had melted.⁵⁸ When Emily looked at the barren garden, summer’s abundance seemed beyond imaging—the whorls of blooms, ripe peaches, the Baldwin apples Vinnie loved.⁵⁹ She thought about her father’s contentment when the Dickinson lot was flush with green and in order. He loved the sense of dominion he felt when his trees were trimmed, firewood piled high, potatoes planted, and manure evenly spread.⁶⁰ That winter Edward Dickinson had reason to feel in command. He was poised to become a delegate to the National Whig Convention and would travel to Baltimore to join others in nominating Daniel Webster for president.⁶¹ Then there was the railroad. Edward’s long work bringing the train to Amherst finally was paying off. When news came that all the railroad stock had been sold, there was a ten-gun salute in his honor. He had recently joined the church, too, along with Vinnie and Sue Gilbert.¶ Like his father, Austin also was taking decisive steps. He had already decided to leave his teaching job and return home in a matter of months to prepare for law school. Harvard Law would be next. As much as Emily loved Austin’s company, it was dreary to think of spending her days washing her brother’s collars, mending his socks, and making sure he had his favorite breakfast: meat and potatoes and that brown bread he asked for.⁶² Emily must have found it hard to believe that anything much would be new for her. When she looked at herself, all she saw was a woman with a soiled dress, a worn apron, and unkempt hair.⁶³

In spite of Vinnie’s occasional ambivalence toward him, William Howland was at it again. He and Vinnie had gone for a ride in the bracing February cold. Emily hoped William had enjoyed her valentine, silly as it was. The poem began with a rush of Latin bombast and some showing off:

“Sic transit gloria mundi,”

“How doth the busy bee,”

“Dum vivimus vivamus,”

I stay mine enemy!

Oh “veni, vidi, vici!”

Oh caput cap-a-pie!

And oh “memento mori”

When I am far from thee!

Hurrah for Peter Parley!

Hurrah for Daniel Boon!

Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman

Who first observed the moon!#

While the poem was typical of valentine nonsense, Emily was proud of it—at least proud enough to send it. She stuffed the seventeen stanzas with images of the Garden of Eden, her father’s apples, legislatures, muskets, Bunker Hill, even India rubbers. She included one scientific metaphor, writing about the Earth on its axis turning around the sun “By way of a gymnastic.” The poem closed with three stanzas of exalted farewell:

Good bye, Sir, I am going;

My country calleth me;

Allow me, Sir, at parting,

To wipe my weeping e’e.

In token of our friendship

Accept this “Bonnie Doon,”

And when the hand that plucked it

Hath passed beyond the moon,

The memory of my ashes

Will consolation be;

Then, farewell, Tuscarora,

And farewell, Sir, to thee!⁶⁴

How could William not appreciate the poem’s absurdity? He knew Emily Dickinson was not headed off to battle.

Emily couldn’t help looking at the sky that day. It had been dazzling lately. The day before, an aurora borealis illuminated the heavens. When he went out for his noon weather readings, Professor Snell saw faint streamers traveling through the sun’s corona. Emily recalled what she had learned in school about the aurora borealis. Some people said an aurora borealis reminded them of a biblical passage from Acts. “And I will show wonders in heaven above and signs on the earth beneath.” **⁶⁵ Northern lights were harbingers, they said, of a future people could not see. Earlier, Emily had confessed to her friend Jane that she had been uncharacteristically bold. “I know you would be surprised,” she had written. “I have dared to do strange things – bold things, and have asked no advice from any.” The winter had been like one long dream, she said. Then she mentioned the gold thread. “What do you weave from all these threads,” Emily asked her friend. “Bring it nearer the window, and I will see, it’s all wrong unless it has one gold thread in it, a long, big shining fibre which hides the others.”⁶⁶ Weeks later Emily shared a similar thought with Abiah. This time it was a golden dream that wouldn’t let her go. “I have been dreaming, dreaming, a golden dream,” she had written, “with eyes all the while wide open.”⁶⁷

By afternoon on February 20, Friday’s Springfield Daily Republican arrived in Amherst and someone from the Dickinson household retrieved it from the post office.⁶⁸ Much to Emily and Vinnie’s disappointment, there were no sensational stories in the newspaper—no heads cut off, no yards of snake in a cow’s intestine. The four pages were filled with advertisements, transportation schedules, news summaries, and claims of medical miracles. On page one there was a poem entitled “The Wretch” by one Meister Karl. It was about a bickering husband and wife who quarreled over the husband’s smoking.

I hope you don’t regret, love,

The times when you were free

To puff those vile segars, love,

Which you’ve resigned for me!

Page two featured a story about the recent celestial wonder. “The exhibition of the Aurora Borealis, last evening, was the most splendid that we have seen for many a night. The King of the North shook out shimmering folds of all his banners, red, argentine, and golden, and from the way in which his threatening scimeters attached the zenith, we judge that it will be found full of holes when seen again. In fact, we saw light shining through in a number of places.”⁶⁹

Situated next to the aurora borealis account in a column to the left was another poem. This one entitled “A Valentine.” Unlike the segar poem, this one was anonymous. The poem began with playful Latin lines. It was Emily’s poem to William Howland: the one for his eyes only. Atop the poem was an editor’s note: “The hand that wrote the following amusing medley to a gentleman friend of ours, as ‘a valentine,’ is capable of very fine things, and there is certainly no presumption in entertaining a private wish that a correspondence, more direct than this, may be established between it and the Republican.”⁷⁰ William must have shared her poem with the editors. Without her consent. Emily knew Vinnie’s beau had lived in Springfield and probably was acquainted with the newspaper’s editors Samuel Bowles and Josiah Holland. A poem in the Springfield newspaper was not like having a prose valentine in a college students’ magazine, she realized. The Republican was more visible, read by people all over New England, and thousands more across the country.†† Some readers even clipped poems out of the newspaper and pasted them in personal journals. No one needed to tell Emily she could write; she already sensed that. But with her valentine in the Republican, she understood—for the first time—professional editors thought so too.^‡‡

Emily did not say a word to Jane or Abiah about the poem. When she wrote to Sue she did not mention it either, saying only that she hoped her letter would travel through hills and dales, across rivers, and “make a poem such as can ne’er be written.”⁷¹ A few days after her verse was published, Emily wrote Austin, rattling on about the memorable evening when all the callers arrived, and Thankful Smith in furs brought up the rear. She let her brother know she hadn’t finished his laundry. The family would send a bundle of clean clothes by the next person traveling to Boston. There was not much news, she said. Father’s rheumatism was acting up. The old cat had not returned, and Vinnie had a new kitten who slept in a basket under the kitchen table.⁷² “How much I have said about nothing,” she wrote, never mentioning the poem.⁷³ Emily was eager for Austin to come home, although she would miss his letters. Her brother’s writing had entertained everyone, especially their father. It didn’t matter to whom Austin’s letters were addressed. Mr. Dickinson opened them all, and read them at the post office, again over supper, and once more by the fire in the evening. In fact, Edward Dickinson was so impressed with Austin’s prose, he wanted to preserve his letters permanently. “Father says your letters are altogether before Shakespeare, and he will have them published to put in our library,” Emily told her brother.⁷⁴

Later that spring, Vinnie and Emily assessed their looks. Vinnie had her picture taken and sent Austin a copy. “I dont like it at all,” she said, “& should be sorry to have you or any one else think I look just like it. I dont think my real face is quite so stupid.”⁷⁵ Emily decided it was time for a change. When the barber came, she asked him to cut her long hair. Vinnie couldn’t believe it. Emily cut her hair, she exclaimed to her brother.§§⁷⁶ With a fashionable new look and a poem in the Republican, Emily shot one of her humorous volleys to Austin. “Now Brother Pegasus, I’ll tell you what it is – I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things. . . . you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!” She was teasing, but barely. When it came to having a talent for words, Emily knew she was the writer in the family.⁷⁷

* Candy pulls were common in the nineteenth century and a way for young men and women to get acquainted. After boiling sugar or molasses, couples would face each other and pull apart a sticky ball of candy. They would lengthen the gooey sweet, double it back up, and stretch it again until the candy became the consistency of taffy. It was a messy exercise, but one New Englanders especially enjoyed.

† The letter prefigures Dickinson’s 1863 poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –.” [F764.]

‡ Fidelia Fiske continued directing her school in Persia (present-day Iran) until ill health forced her return to Massachusetts. She taught at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary from 1859 to 1864. When trustees offered her the position of principal in 1863, she declined. She wanted to return to her school in Persia when her health improved—but she never did. Fiske died in 1864 at age forty-eight. Her book, The Recollections of Mary Lyon with Selections from Her Instruction to the Pupils of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, was published posthumously in 1866.

§ Helen had no idea her mother had literary ambitions. In 1839 Deborah Vinal Fiske wrote five stories for a children’s Sunday-school reader: Youth’s Companion. The stories were published anonymously. [Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 63.] Like her daughter, Deborah Fiske felt domestic life did not sustain her. “My life is slipping away and I am doing nothing but taking care of my family,” she wrote. “I know it is my proper business, but some do so much good besides.” [Phillips, 63.]

¶ Edward Dickinson and Susan Gilbert joined Amherst’s First Church on August 11, 1850. Vinnie joined November 3, 1850. Austin would join the church on January 6, 1856. Emily never joined, the only member of her immediate family not to become a member of Amherst’s First Church. [Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 178, 182, 339.]

# Dickinson’s Latin roughly translates to “Thus passes the glory of the world. Remember that we live to die.” Peter Parley refers to a series of nineteenth-century elementary readers. [“Lydia Maria Child and the Development of Children’s Literature,” Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts, bostonliteraryhistory.com.]

** Edward Dickinson witnessed an aurora borealis in Amherst the previous autumn. So emotionally moved by the display, he rang the church bell, alerting Amherst residents to the phenomenon. “We were all startled by a violent church bell ringing,” Emily wrote Austin, “and thinking nothing but fire, rushed out in the street to see. The sky was a beautiful red, bordering on a crimson, and rays of a gold pink color were constantly shooting off from a kind of sun in the centre.” [L53.]

†† The Republican claimed that it was read by people in every state except Mississippi and every territory except Utah. [Stephen G. Weisner, Embattled Editor: The Life of Samuel Bowles, PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986, 52.]

‡‡ Eudocia Converse [Flynt], a first cousin of the poet’s mother, copied “‘Sic transit gloria mundi’” into her 1848–1853 commonplace book, along with the note “Valentine by Miss E Dickinson of Amherst.” Within some circles at least, readers knew the poem was Dickinson’s. [R. W. Franklin, ed, The Poems of Emily Dickinson Variorum Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 49.]

§§ Around early 1853, Emily enclosed a lock of her hair in a letter to Emily Fowler [Ford]. “I said when the Barber came, I would save you a little ringlet, and fulfilling my promise, I send you one today.” [L99.] Dickinson’s ring of hair is now in Amherst College’s Archives and Special Collections.