Five

TALLER FEET

Saturday, March 1, 1862 9 p.m. Thermometer 23.2 Clouds stra. NW 2. Wind NW 3 Thermometer Attached to Barometer 39.0. Barometer 29,925. Dry Bulb 23.0. Wet Bulb 21.0. Force of Vapor .089. Humidity 72. Remarks: Near 3 ft of snow on the ground. Pleasant Drifts.

—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal kept at Amherst College

The Civil War had been going on for nearly a year and had everyone in Amherst on edge. Mr. Merrick worried his tailor shop couldn’t keep up with the demand for new military coats. He needed more local girls to help with the sewing. Amherst College president William Augustus Stearns was distressed that his son, an adjutant lieutenant, might never return to his science studies. Frazar Stearns had enlisted with other classmates and now was headed south with the Burnside Expedition and Captain Clark, their commander and former chemistry professor.* The new minister in town, Rev. Henry Hubbell, had doubts about remaining at First Church. Parish ministry seemed the sanctuary of the timid, he thought. Shouldn’t he join other men and enlist? Judge Ithamar Conkey feared the Union couldn’t win. After troops lost the Battle of Bull Run, he mounted a box in the center of town and shouted, “You see it is all over. . . . We cannot whip the South!”¹ Widow Adams cared nothing for soapboxes or military bombast. She lay awake at night and wondered if she could get out of bed in the morning. Weeks before, she had received word that her son Sylvester had died of wounds at Annapolis. Earlier another son, Charles, had died of typhoid in camp. The Snells were worried their grieving neighbor would never come out of her darkened bedchamber. “Dead! Both her boys!” Emily had written her cousins Fanny and Loo.² For many residents of Amherst, daylight served as an impudent reminder that battles of every kind continued. As dazed as anyone, Emily found herself asking, “When did the war really begin?”³

She knew, of course. How could she not? But for Emily, living in fateful times went back further than secession. It began with Aunt Lavinia’s death in 1860. “I can’t believe it, when your letters come, saying what Aunt Lavinia said ‘just before she died,’” she had written Vinnie. Emily’s sister had been in Boston staying with their ailing aunt, and tending to Uncle Loring, Fanny, and Loo. “Blessed Aunt Lavinia now,” Emily added. “So many broken-hearted people have got to hear the birds sing, and see all the little flowers grow, just the same as if the sun hadn’t stopped shining forever!”⁴ Emily could not imagine that in less than a year Uncle Loring would be dead, too, leaving her young cousins to fend for themselves. Then came Lincoln’s election that November. Amherst had no telegraph, and young men rode to Northampton to await word. When the sounder came alive after midnight and tapped out news of Lincoln’s victory, the men mounted their horses and raced back eight miles across farmers’ fields to alert the citizens of Amherst. They jostled awake the sexton at First Church and did the same at the college chapel. The sound of bells woke up everyone. Months later, when the dreadful news of Fort Sumter reached Amherst, Reverend Hubbell said the recruiting office set up in the streets.⁵ “Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began,” Emily wrote. “If the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.”⁶

Emily watched men and women doubled up on their daily work to assist with the war effort. Down in Springfield the armory speeded up its manufacturing of weapons. At Mount Holyoke, seminary students prepared boxes for soldiers. One shipment contained seventy-seven pairs of hose, seventeen pairs of mittens, thirty pairs of hospital slippers, reams of writing paper, and lint carefully collected for bandages. For the first time in its history, the Springfield Republican printed extra editions to meet reader demand. As soon as pages slid off the press, newspapermen tacked them to boards outside, and crowds elbowed their way to search the latest casualty lists. One Springfield woman—no doubt wondering what she could contribute—waited as trains loaded with soldiers pulled out of the station. She reached up and pushed a small object into a young man’s outstretched hands—a jar of preserved ginger.⁷ Women were not exempt from the call for help, and government officials asked for their assistance. One day Emily unfolded the local newspaper to read an appeal aimed directly at her. “The ladies of Amherst are urgently requested to take into immediate consideration the recent statement of the Secretary of the Sanitary Commission at Washington that among the contributions already forwarded there is a deficiency in the article of substantial woolen socks. . . . Our long pleasant evenings are before us and we take the liberty to suggest that every elderly, every middle aged, and every young lady in our town that they pledge themselves to contribute one or more pairs of socks.”† ⁸

Emily chose not to knit socks, but she was busy. “I can’t stop to strut, in a world where bells toll,” she told the Hollands.⁹ Her pile of fascicles had grown. At least fifteen individual booklets were stacked nearby, all folded and stitched with thread. Emily was writing with the greatest intensity of her life. She had written over three-hundred poems—so many that some were loose and not bound. For several years she had been working on one poem that was unlike anything she had ever written. She couldn’t quite get it right and asked Sue for help. The verse consumed her and would embody every literary principle she embraced. Later that March day the poem would be made public. The work was a towering achievement, even if hardly anyone knew it was Emily’s.^‡

As much as Emily and Susan were devoted to each other, the two women had at times a contentious relationship. Emily could be annoyingly insistent, prodding Sue to write when she was away from home or demanding time when Sue’s hands were full. Austin and Sue’s first child, Ned, was less than a year old, and his care added to Sue’s preoccupation.§ Emily’s professions of love could also be suffocating and sometimes made her sister-in-law distance herself rather than draw closer. Sue had her faults too. She knew she could be cool and imperious, and once likened herself to someone who—while “pronounced”—sweetened under chastisement and discipline.¹⁰ Around town Susan Dickinson earned respect for her intellect. “There is in her,” one young man said, “something different from other Amherst girls.” But some people noticed insensitivity and what one called no “refinement of feeling.”¹¹ Helen Hunt experienced both sides of Susan Dickinson. The two initially enjoyed conversations and rambles through the woods. But after one huckleberry party, a falling-out occurred. Their quarrel made a sham of friendship, Helen said, and she vowed to have nothing more to do with her.¹² There was no doubt Sue could be difficult. She seemed trapped, or wrestled with a foe only she could see. Even at the beginning of their relationship, Austin experienced Sue’s dark moods. Once during their engagement when he was cradling Sue in his arms, she expressed doubts about their impending marriage. The admission crushed Austin and he responded with an ultimatum: marry me or don’t. The next day he apologized and tried to retract his words, but the exchange already had damaged them both.¹³

The first schism between Emily and her sister-in-law came in 1854, the summer after Austin and Sue became engaged. Austin had finished his education at Harvard Law School when Sue took mysteriously ill. She could barely eat, managing only broth and small bites of chicken. Emily worried and suspected nervous fever, remembering other times when Sue’s bouts of depression had sent her spiraling. She had contemplated suicide once.¹⁴ If Sue had anxieties about marriage, Emily would have understood. Emily thought marriage could threaten a woman’s intellect, imagination, and sense of self. She told Sue so in an earlier letter.

You and I have been strangely silent upon this subject, Susie, we have often touched upon it, and as quickly fled away, as children shut their eyes when the sun is too bright for them. . . . Susie, we must speak of these things. How dull our lives must seem to the bride, and the plighted maiden, whose days are fed with gold, and who gathers pearls every evening; but to the wife, Susie, sometimes the wife forgotten, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now need naught but – dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace – they know that the man of noon is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous.¹⁵

Seeing no improvement in Sue’s condition, her sister Mattie whisked her to Albany to recuperate with relatives. With every mile away from the Dickinsons and marriage plans, Sue grew stronger.¹⁶ From New York she continued west to more relatives. Austin visited her in Chicago, but did not stay. During the time Sue was gone, Emily wrote frequent letters and pleaded for a response. Exasperated with not hearing a word, Emily finally put it bluntly. “Sue – you can go or stay – There is but one alternative – We differ often lately, and this must be the last. You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved. . . . Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge – then pass on singing Sue, and up the distant hill I journey on.”¹⁷ The letter must have felt to Sue like another high-toned Dickinson ultimatum. But there was a difference. This time Emily included a poem. “I have a Bird in spring,” it began, “Which for myself doth sing – .”¹⁸ The metaphor was hardly lost on Sue, and she understood that the last word in the poem—“Return”—carried special weight. A bird still sang and melody connected them, the poem suggested. Whether that melody represented the bond between the two women, the power of poetry, or something else—Sue understood its presence sustained Emily.

The “go or stay” standoff between the women was not mentioned again. Sue returned to Amherst, and she and Austin were married. But around the time of Ned’s 1861 birth, tension resurfaced between Sue and Emily. Not wanting to risk another rupture, Sue offered a blanket apology: “If you have suffered this past Summer,” she wrote, “I am sorry. . . . I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover—If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we?”¹⁹ Sue knew that Emily often responded to unease by writing: tumult seemed to propel, not silence her. Emily already had shared over seventy-five poems with Sue—more than she had sent to anyone. There were poems about ambition, buried bulbs sprouting shoots, and unrealized success. There also were poems of rejection and deprivation. “A wounded Deer – leaps highest – ,” Emily observed in one poem. And in another,

A little bread, a crust – a crumb,

A little trust, a Demijohn –

Can keep the soul alive – ²⁰

So many poems flew between the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens that Sue dubbed the route the “Pony Express.”²¹ As occupied as she was, Sue tried to make time for Emily’s work. She read the poems, studied them, and appeared to save every note, scrap, and word. When they first had become friends, Emily recognized that Sue understood her in ways that other girls did not. All her life, Emily searched for what she called “the rare Ear.”²² In Sue, she found one.

But Sue didn’t know everything about Emily. She didn’t know that Emily had written another note to the unnamed Master and then another one after that. She didn’t know that Emily had professed her love and now pleaded with the Master to visit Amherst. The new letters were similar to the first one she had written: passionate, confounding, and unclear if they had been sent or retained as drafts. But there were differences. The vulnerability of the first letter had turned to ache. “I am older – tonight,” Emily wrote in the first of the two new letters,

but the love is the same – so are the moon and the crescent. If it had been God’s will that I might breathe where you breathed – and find the place – myself – at night – if I (can) never forget that I am not with you – and that sorrow and frost are nearer than I – if I wish with a might I cannot repress – that mine were the Queen’s place – the love of the Plantagenet is my only apology . . . Have you the Heart in your breast – Sir – is it set like mine – a little to the left . . . I dont know what you can do for it – thank you – Master – but if I had the Beard on my cheek – like you – and you – had Daisy’s petals – and you cared so for me – what would become of you? Could you forget me in fight, or flight – or the foreign land? Could’nt Carlo, and you and I walk in the meadows an hour – and nobody care but the Bobolink . . . I used to think when I died – I could see you – so I died as fast as I could . . . but I can wait more – wait till my hazel hair is dappled – and you carry the cane – then I can look at my watch – and if the Day is too far declined – we can take the chances (of) for Heaven – What would you do with me if I came “in white?” Have you the little chest to put the Alive – in? I want to see you more – Sir – than all I wish for in this world – and the wish – altered a little – will be my only one – for the skies. Could you come to New England – (this summer – could) would you come to Amherst – Would you like to come – Master?²³

Emily was even more desolate in the letter that followed. Her sentences were torrents of words that stuttered and faltered and then regained their bearing. It seemed that even using the word “I” was too painful for Emily: she cushioned herself with a more distant reference, calling herself “she” and “Daisy” and her Master “it.” Most of all, she apologized—for what she did not say—and pleaded for her Master’s affection. Edits and second thoughts were more numerous, exposing the poet trapped in doubt, despair, panic, and subjugation.

Oh, did I offend it – (Did’nt it want me to tell it the truth) Daisy – Daisy – offend it – who bends her smaller life to his (it’s) meeker (lower) every day . . . she cannot guess to make that master glad – A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart – pushing aside the blood and leaving her faint (all) and white in the gust’s arm. Daisy – who never flinched thro’ that awful parting, but held her life so tight he should not see the wound . . . tell her her (offence) fault – Master – if it is (not so) small eno’ to cancel with her life, (Daisy) she is satisfied – but punish – (do not) dont banish her – shut her in prison, Sir – only pledge that you will forgive – sometime – before the grave, and Daisy will not mind – She will awake in (his) your likeness. Wonder stings me more than the Bee . . . I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that dont hurt me much. (If you) Her Master stabs her more – . . . Master – open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired – I will never be noisy when you want to be still. I will be (glad) (as the) your best little girl – nobody else will see me, but you – but that is enough – I shall not want any more.²⁴

As searing as her words were, they may have provided release. Emily always turned to language to soothe or lessen her distress. The letters could have served as a reminder of the pain she had experienced, but survived. Whatever purpose she had in writing remained a secret known only to her. She never shied away from looking anguish in the eye or contemplating its aftermath. To do so was an act of dominion over misery and resistance to inertia. Emily placed the new letters with the old one, tucking all three away and out of sight.

IN THE REMARKABLE new poem Emily was writing, there was no tone of anguish. “Safe in their alabaster chambers,” she began, drawing the first letter of the new poem with a bold S. Emily wanted to contrast the stasis of the dead with the vitality of the living. As she read over the poem and examined it, she swapped out commas for dashes, changed lowercase letters to capitals, and experimented with word choice. Something more fundamental also occupied her mind. She was thinking about the nature of literary imagery itself, possibly remembering the first sight of dandelions in Abiah Root’s hair and how the weeds had altered everything. She also had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet.” Where do images come from? Emerson asked. What should they do? How do they register in a reader’s consciousness? Emily recalled the copy of Emerson’s poems that one of her father’s long-ago law clerks had given her. The essays made clear—as sometimes Mr. Emerson’s poems did not—the qualities necessary for great poetry. Don’t be too clever with language, he warned. Avoid verse that is a “music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms.” Inspiration, he said, should come from the “picture-language” of nature—sunlight, air, and the living world around us. Emerson believed that beauty is more profound, when it is felt rather than explained. Emily thought about the poems in her fascicles with all their unidentified subjects. She had tried to capture the essence of an object by the way it made her feel, not necessarily by the way it looked. “As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye,” Emerson wrote, “so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind.”²⁵ The idea of where images registered was important to Emily. It was not enough to paint a scene with detailed accuracy: the way an eye apprehended it. Adjectives could be piled deep, for example, in describing the multiple shades of a green leaf. But Emerson’s essay, with its talk of retinas and essence gave her an idea for creating an image that went beyond the retina, beyond what was literally recognizable. She wanted her language to awaken a deeper awareness than what the physical eye could perceive. If she could find the right abstraction and sensation, it might unlock the primeval human consciousness she hoped to touch.¶ Emily took her pencil and marked a passage in Emerson’s essay. “We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.”²⁶

Emily had another reason for paying attention to Ralph Waldo Emerson—a personal one. Recently, Emerson had dined and spent the night with Austin and Sue. Austin had organized an Amherst lecture series and brought to town an array of impressive visitors: senators, abolitionists, and literary men. Emerson is the “prince of lecturers,” the local newspaper proclaimed, days before his arrival. But after Emerson spoke, the room buzzed with disappointment. The problem with the lecture, some said, was it was too clear. “It was in the English language instead of the Emersonese in which he usually clothes his thoughts,” one had remarked.²⁷ Sue did not have much of an opinion on the matter. That night she was far too excited about strolling home on Mr. Emerson’s “transcendental arm”—as she put it—than to focus on his clarity. During their walk across the town common, Emerson had spoken of Julia Ward Howe and encouraged Sue to read her collection of poetry, Passion Flowers. Once inside the Evergreens, he noticed another book he admired—Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel of the House.” He loved Patmore’s depiction of wives’ devotion to their husbands, a subject on which Sue no doubt had opinions. But Susan did not want to talk about other poets; she wanted to talk about Emerson. His poem “Brahma” had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. It was a meditation on existence and divinity that some readers thought subtle, others absurd, and a few pretentious. What is it about? Sue asked as the two sat near the fire. Is it a kind of Rosetta Stone? Emerson smiled. “Oh there was nothing to understand!” he replied. “How could they make so much fuss over it!” Sue must have been bewildered, perhaps even disheartened by the remark. She thought poetry should have a point, with language that adhered and coalesced toward a center—at least that’s what she had been discussing with Emily. Emily was not much help in explaining the mystery of Ralph Waldo Emerson.²⁸ He seemed, she had said, to have “come from where dreams were born.”#

Imagery was not the only challenge Emily faced in her new poem. Also on her mind was the large question Sue had raised with Emerson: what is a poem about? Emily questioned how explicit she should be in her poetry. Some of her earlier poems were straightforward, such as one she entitled “Snow flakes”: “I counted till they danced so / Their slippers leaped the town.”²⁹ But it was her inclination to come at an idea not directly, but “slant,” she would call it.³⁰ In the verse she was working on, the first stanza started clearly to establish the setting. While she never named exactly what she was talking about, Emily believed the final line left little doubt that she was describing a tomb.

Safe in their alabaster chambers,

Untouched by morning,

And untouched by noon,

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,

Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.

Emily was deliberate in beginning the poem with the word “Safe.” It sounded reassuring—hopefully too much so. She wondered if the dead were as safe as clergy might suggest. Waiting for resurrection could take a while, the ironic “Safe” seemed to imply. Or resurrection might never come at all. In painting a scene of coffins and tombs, Emily offered no Christian comfort and no reward for a virtuous life. Also absent was the rigorous rectitude that Mary Lyon had preached. The most glaring absence in the first stanza was the omission of heaven itself. The life after death that Emily presented was a world of stasis, passivity and silence: a chamber where the meek members of the resurrection did not move.

When it came to the second stanza, Emily wanted contrast. She wanted to present the natural world flitting above the dead, oblivious to those who slept below: the breeze laughs, the bee babbles, the birds pipe ignorant—even mocking—cadences. In the final line, Emily elected to be clear. She used a compact summation to declare what the poem meant. Yet there was more than summation in the last line—articulated not so much by what was said, but by what was not. The dead have simply perished, the last five words declare. They have not entered the kingdom of heaven. While the meek members may be sleeping—or “lying” as she later changed her mind to assert—they never would awaken. There was no resurrection in Emily’s poem—only perpetual internment.³¹

Light laughs the breeze

In her castle above them,

Babbles the bee in a stolid ear,

Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence:

Ah! what sagacity perished here!

Emily looked at the poem and deemed it ready—ready to show Sue. She sent the poem to the Evergreens via Pony Express.

Sue was not the only one reading Emily’s new poems. Springfield Republican editor Samuel Bowles was as well. Sam had been the first dinner guest at the Evergreens after Sue and Austin married, and the three had become devoted friends.** Over the years, Bowles had shared with them his large cultural and political world. They met author Bret Harte, Thoreau’s friend Franklin Sanborn, and Harper’s Weekly editor George William Curtis. It was not uncommon for Bowles to pull a letter out of his pocket from an editor in London or relay conversations he had had with the president, cabinet members, abolitionists, or prominent literary women. He became a treasured friend of Emily’s, too, bringing her down to earth when she drifted too high into the ether, and serving as her interpreter of world events. When she hadn’t seen Sam for a while, Emily admitted she needed him to absorb the worst developments of the war. If Samuel Bowles delivered the news, she said “failure in a Battle – were easier.”³² An introspective man up to a point, Bowles was aware of his shortcomings. He could be diffuse, unable to focus, and incapable or unwilling to plumb depths. He was—a friend said—simply a pragmatic newspaperman through and through.³³ One evening Sue and Austin had hosted for Henry Ward Beecher and others displayed the core of Sam’s character. After Beecher had commented on the beauty of a vase of flowers, he became pensive, and spoke of his childhood. I used to sit on the doorstep, he told the gathering, and listen to the wind in the branches. “I could hear the faint hum of the spinning wheel in the garret, and a tender sadness seemed to gather about me and melt my nature ’till I cried like a child.” What was it? he asked. What made me cry? Sue and the other guests were touched by his emotion and grew quiet. A visiting Episcopal bishop offered a tentative response: “It was doubtless, Beecher, a sense of the infinite pressing down upon your young soul.” Bowles was uneasy with the vulnerability he felt and shrugged. “You had probably been eating green apples, Beecher!!” he joked. The guests laughed and the poignancy of the moment evaporated.³⁴ Bowles’s remark underscored that he was often uncomfortable with boring too deeply and sought to keep situations light. No one could be harder on Bowles than himself. He called himself “a suggestion, rather than a realization, & elusive & spasmodic & fragmentary: but no more to others than to myself.”³⁵ He was right about his scattered ways, but Bowles was wrong about what he meant to others. For the past two years, Emily had been confiding in him and sending him poems.††

Given their interests and affection for one another, Sue, Sam, and Emily formed a literary alliance. All three exchanged notes on poets and the latest news from the Atlantic Monthly.³⁶ Sue let Sam know when the Republican published a poem she liked, and she clipped and saved verses from his newspaper.³⁷ Bowles was not hesitant to publish women writers. After a young woman sent her work, he had responded with encouragement. “Though my ‘weakness’ is not poetry,” he had confessed, “I am . . . charmed with your little compact, thoughtful, mysterious & suggestive poems.”³⁸ He also looked for more experienced literary women whose work had a grand sweep. When Julia Ward Howe wrote new lyrics to the battle hymn “John Brown’s Body,” Bowles lifted them from the Atlantic Monthly and reprinted them immediately in the Republican.^‡‡ “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” the powerful verse began. While Bowles was open to publishing women, he also made clear that the Republican was not fond of what it labeled gloomy female writing. A Republican column spelled it out.³⁹ “There is another kind of writing only too common, appealing to the sympathies of the reader without recommending itself to his subject. It may be called the literature of misery,” he wrote. “The writers are chiefly women, gifted women may be, full of thought and feeling and fancy, but poor, lonely and unhappy. . . . The sketch or poem is usually the writer’s photograph in miniature. It reveals a countenance we would gladly brighten, but not by exposing it to the gaze of a worthless world.”⁴⁰

But Bowles had been exposing Emily’s verse to the world, and without her direct consent. Besides Emily’s valentine a decade earlier, the Republican had recently published two more of Emily’s poems. “Nobody knows this little rose,” had appeared in 1858, along with a headnote stating the newspaper had “surreptitiously” received it.⁴¹ In 1861, the Republican had printed “I taste a liquor never brewed.” Perhaps Sam was growing bolder or more confident in making Emily’s poems public, although all the verses appeared anonymously. Years later, Sue all but confessed to being the one who slipped Emily’s poems to Bowles. “Love turned to larceny,” she said.⁴²

Now when Sue looked at a draft of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers – ” she was tempted again. If she had concerns about what some might see as blasphemy in the poem’s view of the afterlife, she never said so. The poem impressed her, as did the lingering chill it produced. But before she made any decision about sending it to Sam, she wanted to talk with Emily. Sue didn’t entirely like the poem, though not because of its provocative view of death as eternal entombment. What gave her pause was the second stanza—the one about the bees and breeze. To Sue, it didn’t work. Emily went to work on the poem again. She sifted through the fascicles and all the loose sheets of poems. She knew she had several versions of the verse. All the alternate versions began with the same first stanza. But in version two, Emily experimented with a radically different ending. She hoped Sue would like the new second stanza. Emily placed the fascicle next to her on the small writing table, took up her pencil, copied the poem over, and sent it to the Evergreens. “Perhaps this verse would please you better – Sue,” she wrote.⁴³ Compared to version one, version two was large, sweeping, more abstract, more like Beecher’s reverie on the infinite. Emily tried to put into practice what she was learning about imagery, and hoped the final image of the poem would register with Sue. But after Sue read the second version, she liked it less than the first. It was that second stanza again, or “verse” as Sue called it. While she thought Emily’s experiment with imagery was exceptional, she argued that its brilliance detracted from the poem as a whole. Stanzas should conform and blend together, she told Emily. Better to cut the second stanza altogether and that final wild image. She put her thoughts down in a note:

I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse – It is remarkable as the chain lightening that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky but it does not go with the ghostly shimmer of the first verse as well as the other one – It just occurs to me that the first verse is complete in itself it needs no other, and can’t be coupled – Strange things always go alone – as there is only one Gabriel and one Sun—You never made a peer for that verse, and I guess you[r] kingdom does’nt hold one – I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again.⁴⁴

Sue wanted it cold. Emily put the second version aside, looked through her manuscripts again, and took Sue’s quip about no “peer for that verse” as a challenge. Her kingdom did indeed hold others, she thought to herself. Emily located a third version with a new second stanza, and off it went via Pony Express. “Is this frostier?” she asked.⁴⁵

Springs – shake the Sills –

But – the Echoes – stiffen –

Hoar – is the Window – and numb – the Door –

Tribes of Eclipse – in Tents of Marble –

Staples of Ages – have buckled – there –

Emily also added a personal note. She thanked Sue for her advice and said how much it meant to her. Yet her words of gratitude were oddly crafted—issued in a lurching cadence and as slant as her metaphors. It was unclear why Emily was so indirect in expressing appreciation. Her note seemed to reassure herself that Sue’s suggestions were worth taking. The only phrase in the entire note that didn’t stammer came at the end. In the years since admitting she wanted to be distinguished, Emily’s dream had only grown stronger.

Dear Sue –

Your praise is good – to me – because I know it knows – and suppose – it means –

Could I make you and Austin – proud – sometime – a great way off – ’twould give me taller feet – ⁴⁶

No additional versions of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” passed between the houses. Emily was at work on other poems, and—as usual—tinkering and adding edits to ones she had already written. The harsh winter lingered. Professor Snell had measured waist-high drifts in the woods around Amherst.⁴⁷ Avalanches of ice had demolished chimneys at the college and damaged Mr. Kellogg’s store. One frozen slide near the center of town almost knocked passersby to their knees.⁴⁸ Then there was the fire that rattled everyone. All Rodolphus Hubbard had wanted to do was support the troops. He’d climbed up to his attic, hoisted the American flag, and set off burning powder to cheer the Union victory at Fort Donelson. But before he knew it, the powder ignited the ceiling and then the floor and soon the entire attic was engulfed. Emily could smell smoke from her window. Lucky for Hubbard, help arrived and his house was saved—but not before there was considerable destruction. Furniture and floors were charred, and Hubbard’s pride took a beating. He was so embarrassed he took out an advertisement in the Amherst newspaper and apologized for all the commotion. “We had run up the stars and stripes from the roof of the house, and by burning powder, were doing what we could to testify our joy in view of the triumph of the arms of the Nation,” he wrote. “But it was not part of our programme to burn the house.”⁴⁹

Given the march of the Burnside Expedition, cascading ice, and fire in Mr. Hubbard’s attic, people in Amherst had reason to feel anxious. But that Saturday, March 1, something else startled Emily. Sam Bowles had published “Safe in their alabaster chambers” in his newspaper.§§ It was the version that Sue least disliked—the one with the second stanza about the breeze and the bees. Before Emily could say a word, Sue dashed off a preemptory note promising they would talk as soon as she could. “Emily—All’s well,” she wrote. Susan had her hands full again. The maid was out and she could not leave little Ned alone.¶¶ “There are two or three little things I wanted to talk with you about without witnesses,” she continued. “Has girl read Republican? It takes as long to start our Fleet as the Burnside.”⁵⁰

Our Fleet? What did Sue mean? Sue suggested she had a hand in the poem—if not in writing and editing, then in securing publication. Did Sue mean to imply that Emily wanted “Safe in their alabaster chambers” printed in the Republican? And why did she complain about it taking so long for the poem to appear—comparing its launch to General Burnside’s expedition? There was no doubt that Sue was delighted Emily’s poem had been published, nettle-some second stanza and all. But did Emily feel that way?

She did not say. As usual—when it came to publication, Emily said nothing. With all the versions of her alabaster poem before her, Emily knew which one she preferred. She disagreed with Sue. Emily liked version two—the one with the experimental imagery. The second stanza read as if the poet were standing at the edge of the universe and looking back at Earth. From that perspective, all of humankind, all of history, all of the world’s eminence and strife looked insignificant. The planet was nothing more than a molecule and the dead merely atoms. It was the final image that encompassed everything Dickinson was coming to understand. It was an image evoking Emerson’s “terrible simplicity”—abstract and astonishing—and as cold as ice.⁵¹

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,

Untouched by morning –

And untouched by noon –

Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –

Rafter of satin – and Roof of stone –

Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –

Worlds scoop their Arcs –

And Firmaments – row –

Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –

Soundless as dots – on a Disc of snow –

Union general Ambrose Burnside’s troops were closing in on North Carolina. Weeks earlier, Amherst College boys saw their first battle in a cypress swamp near Roanoke, Virginia.⁵² Bullets fell in a murderous volley, one soldier had said, and there was no time to count the dead.⁵³ Amherst residents had to wait for days before Samuel Bowles’s pressmen finally tacked bulletins outside the Springfield Republican listing the casualties. They scanned the names of the killed and wounded: “Adjutant Stearns in the head and neck, not badly.”⁵⁴ Ten days later, a letter from Frazar arrived and news of the Amherst College president’s son swept through town like a squall. One wound to the neck and one to the forehead, Frazar wrote. He was fine, and marching with Captain Clark toward Newbern.## ⁵⁵ Even as she worked, Emily wondered if she could sustain the concentration her poems required. She thought about writers who kept working in the face of sorrow. Robert Browning wrote poetry after the death of his wife, she remembered. The thought consoled her. “I, myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps,” Emily wrote her cousins Fanny and Loo. “Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.”⁵⁶ The days before her would be monumental. Within a month, she would share her majestic alabaster poem with someone else. Little did she know, that step would change her life.

* The Burnside Expedition, led by Union brigadier general Ambrose Burnside, took place from February to June 1862. The expedition involved troops from New England, including Amherst, and sought to blockade ports along the North Carolina coast.

† The Sanitary Commission was a private relief organization founded in 1861 to support Union soldiers. The commission’s president was clergyman Henry Whitney Bellows; landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted served as general secretary. The work of the commission focused on providing food, clothing, blankets, and medical care to soldiers. In many cities—including Springfield, Massachusetts—the commission ran Sanitary Fairs featuring art exhibitions, parades, and literary publications that raised money for the cause.

‡ Dickinson’s composition of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” F124, is the only extant example that demonstrates the back-and-forth editing process between Emily and Susan Gilbert Dickinson. A close examination of its composition reveals much about the women’s relationship and Dickinson’s artistic principles.

§ Edward “Ned” Dickinson was born June 19, 1861. His birth was emotionally difficult for Sue. Her sister Mattie had lost her first child five days earlier, and Ned was born on the exact date that eleven years earlier Sue’s other sister Mary had died in childbirth. Ned’s crying, teething, and the family’s difficulty in hiring help added to Sue’s strain. Like their inability to settle on a wedding date, Sue and Austin vacillated and waited half a year to name their son. For months he was called “Jackey” for Union Jack, but eventually the couple named their firstborn after Austin’s father. Sue sent a note, in the infant’s voice, asking his grandfather for permission to share the name. Edward gave his answer in a tender response. “I have rec’d your letter, asking me if I am willing that you should have a name like mine—And I say, in this reply, which you can read, as well as you could write the other, that if you will be a good boy, ride in your carriage & not cry, and always mind your father and mother, I will consent to your being called Edward Dickinson; and promise you a Silver Cup to drink from, as soon as you are big enough to hold it in your hands. Your affectionate Grandfather.” [Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), 39; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 39.]

¶ I am indebted to the teaching and writing of David Porter, who cites Archibald MacLeish in describing what makes Dickinson’s imagery unique: “‘[Dickinson’s images do not] exist upon the retina. . . . [They can not] be brought into focus by the muscles of the eye.’” [David Porter, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, 26.]

# Unfortunately, no historical record exists that indicates if Emily joined Emerson in conversation that evening at the Evergreens. It is likely she stayed home. In her essay depicting the cultural life of her home, “Annals of the Evergreens,” Susan Gilbert Dickinson does not say either way. To compound matters, Emerson’s visit occurred in 1857—a year for which not a single Dickinson letter has been recovered. All we have concerning the visit are Sue’s details in Annals, and her memory of Dickinson’s remark about Emerson. Scholar David Porter offered a memorable way of thinking about the significance of that evening. He points out that before Emerson’s Amherst visit, Walt Whitman had sent him a copy of Leaves of Grass. Emerson read the poems, was deeply impressed, and responded to Whitman, declaring, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” [RWE to WW July 21, 1855, Library of Congress.] Porter argues that the evening Emerson spent next door to Emily Dickinson after writing Whitman marks the genesis of modern American poetry, with all its ambiguity, angles, and disjuncture. At that moment, Porter said, all three—Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson—“were like sides of a triangle that do not meet.” [David Porter, conversation with the author.]

** Bowles had been coming to Amherst for several years to cover the college commencement season. He had inherited the Springfield Republican from his father, and worked his way up from office boy to printing room and from reporter to editor. He hired Josiah Holland in 1849, first as an assistant editor then promoted him to serve alongside him as co editor.

†† The dating of Dickinson poems is difficult because she did not assign dates to her verse. Dating also is complicated because while scholars can postulate the date Dickinson included a poem in a fascicle, they cannot know when Dickinson initially composed it. Given these caveats, Ralph Franklin believes that before 1862, Dickinson sent Bowles eight poems: Two swimmers wrestled on the spar (F227); “Faith” is a fine invention (F202); Would you like Summer? Taste our’s (F272); Jesus! thy Crucifix (F197); Should you but fail – at Sea (F275); Title divine – is mine! (F194); Through the strait pass of suffering (F187); and Speech – is a prank of Parliament (F193).

‡‡ It was not uncommon for newspapers to reprint poems from other papers or journals like the Atlantic. A poem that appeared in a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, easily could have been picked up by another newspaper in Denver or Brooklyn without editors, readers, or the poem’s author knowing it.

§§ The Republican version of the poem changed some of Dickinson’s capital letters to lowercase, converted dashes to commas, and indented several lines.

¶¶ One of many Irish immigrants to settle in Amherst in midcentury, Margaret O’Brien came to work for the Dickinsons in 1856. She stayed for nine years, until Margaret Maher began employment with the family. In her astute study, Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language, Aife Murray argues that Dickinson’s great literary productivity in the 1860s was due in part to having more time to work on her poems. With domestic help from O’Brien and Maher, the poet’s housekeeping responsibilities lessened.

## Newspapers in Dickinson’s time referred to Newbern as one word. Today the city is identified as New Bern, North Carolina.